Populism and Civil Society: The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy 2021031185, 2021031186, 9780197526590, 9780197526583, 9780197526606, 9780197526613, 9780197526620, 0197526594

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Populism and Civil Society

Populism and Civil Society The Challenge to Constitutional Democracy A N D R EW A R AT O A N D J E A N L . C O H E N

1

3 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Arato, Andrew, author. | Cohen, Jean L., author. Title: Populism and civil society : the challenge to constitutional democracy / by Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021031185 (print) | LCCN 2021031186 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197526590 (paperback) | ISBN 9780197526583 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197526606 (updf) | ISBN 9780197526613 (epub) | ISBN 9780197526620 (oso) Subjects: LCSH: Populism. | Civil society. | Political culture. Classification: LCC JC 423.A6845 2021 (print) | LCC JC423 (ebook) | DDC 320.56/62—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031185 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031186 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197526583.001.0001 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Paperback printed by LSC Communications, United States of America Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments 

vii

Introduction: Defining Populism  What Is Populism? How to Define the Phenomenon  What Is Populism: Immanent Critique  What Is Populism: Construction of the Ideal Type  Different Populisms: Mobilization, Party, Government, and Regime  The Plan of the Book 

1 2 4 7 14 17

1. Populism: Why and Why Now?  The Long Term: The Fundamental Contradiction of   Modern Democracy  The Middle Term: Deficits of Representation  The Short Term: Bait and Switch, Populist Supply, and Media Strategies 

25

2. Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  Social Movements: Their Logic and Limits  Political Parties and Their Transformation  Populist Mobilization, Its Dynamics and Tensions: The Cases 

53 56 62 68

Movement Parties and the Movementization of Parties  Populist Logic: Implications for Populist Parties and Democratic Party Systems 

85

The Turn to Mobilization  Populism and the Media 

Mobilization by or with Parties  Mobilization by a Government or a Chief Executive  Mobilization from below in Civil Society 

The Pars Pro Toto Logic and the Relapse into Factionalism  The Friend–​Enemy Political Logic and Affective Polarization  The Anti-​Establishment Stance and the Permanent   Movementization of Anti-​Party Parties 

29 32 39 46 48

70 73 74

89 90 93

100

Conclusion 

102

3. Populist Governments and Their Logic  Democracy Revisited  Populism in Government: Democracy Enhancing or Eviscerating?  Populist Government I: Qualified Authoritarianism? 

107 110 122 130

The Threshold Issue  Populist Government II: Illiberal Democracy?    The Concept of Illiberal Democracy    The Populist Hybrid Regime 

134 138 139 145

vi Contents

4. Populism and Constitutionalism  Introduction  Contesting the Balance between Popular Sovereignty   and Constitutionalism 

Version 1. Popular Constitutionalism and Populism in Opposition  Version 2: Movements and Governments in Populist Constitutional Replacement  Version 3: Constitution Replacement Dominated by Executives: Peru and Hungary  Version 4: Constitutional Politics via Amendment and Court Packing: Turkey and Poland  The Version after: Populist Treatment of New Constitutions 

153 153 156 156

160 165 169 173

Is There a Populist Constitutionalism? 

175

Constitutionalism of the Constituent Power 

183

5. Alternatives to Populism  Popular, Plural, and Constitutionalist Democracy vs.   Populist Democratic Monism 

185

Rescuing (Some of) the Host Ideologies 

201

Notes  Bibliography  Index 

221 277 295

Inherited Constitutionalism  A New Balance?  Constitutional Instrumentalism?  Abusive Constitutionalism  Political Constitutionalism as Norm? 

The Popular vs. the Populist  Popular Sovereignty  From “Thin Ideology” to the Norms of Democracy  Toward a New Political Narrative  The Constituent Power, Democratic Constitutionalism,   and Consensus Democracy 

178 178 179 179 181

186 186 187 190 191

195

The Welfare Deficit and the Renewal of Social Democracy  202 The Cultural Gap: Status Deficits and the Renewal of Social Solidarity  209 Civil Society and a Dualistic Strategy  214

Preface and Acknowledgments This book was written in 2020—​one of the worst years in our history. A global health crisis comparable only to the deadly flu pandemic a century ago, a severe economic downturn seriously exacerbating extreme inequality the likes of which has also not been seen in Western industrialized countries since the American “gilded age,” and the rise of authoritarian (most of them) populists to power globally, including in some supposedly consolidated democracies, were bad enough. Making everything worse was the brazen attempt of a sitting US president to deny the results of a free and fair election which he lost, through the technique of the “big lie,” declaring that the election was riddled with fraud, that he won by a “landslide” (he lost by 7 million votes and a large electoral college defeat), and then exerting pressure on impartial officials in the states to “find him votes” and on courts to find in his favor—​i.e., to enable the commission of actual (and not just falsely claimed) fraud. The culmination came very early in 2021 (on January 6), when the defeated, lame duck, president fomented an insurrection to block the peaceful transfer of power, by inviting an armed mob to attack the Capitol building. That mob penetrated into the halls of Congress and threatened the lives of congressional representatives, senators, and the vice president. Five people died in the melee. They interrupted the certification of the election of incoming President Biden, a constitutionally mandated but normally pedestrian process. Happily they failed. The Capitol was cleared of the insurrectionists, and Biden was indeed certified as the next president of the United States that very night. But the damage to our democracy was done. Many used to think that such things as self-​coups or “autogolpes” and armed challenges to elections happen somewhere else, not in long-​consolidated democracies, and certainly not in the United States—​the imagined beacon of the peaceful transition of power and governments. We had better think again and very hard. That is what this book seeks to do. We take the contemporary challenge of populism to democracy very seriously, even though we situate this challenge within instead of outside the democratic imaginary. We realize that what is needed is analytical clarity, cogent theoretical analysis, political prudence, and good judgment, but also deep commitment to fighting the populist challenge—​a fight that can only be won by expanding, not simply restoring, democracy and justice in our societies. We now know that “it”—​undermining of democracy and social justice—​can indeed happen here, and everywhere. The goal of this book is to make a small contribution to help ensure that this challenge does not succeed.

viii  Preface and Acknowledgments To be sure, the preparatory work and earlier versions of some of the chapters were done well before 2020. Indeed in that respect the book was long in the making. But because we were both on leave during much of 2020 we were able to complete the manuscript during this fateful year in somewhat peaceful (and yes privileged) isolation from the tumult around us. Nevertheless we of course felt, and still do, deep tension and anxiety for the future caused not only by the pandemic but also by the disastrous political developments that have undermined democracy, East and West, North and South. The contrast with the period in which we wrote and published our first joint book project, Civil Society and Political Theory, couldn’t be greater.1 Having participated in the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s and in the challenge to “really existing” communist dictatorships in Soviet-​type societies in Eastern Europe, it seemed then that the democratization of democracy (in the United States and the West generally) and the transition to democracy in the Eastern authoritarian regimes was on the agenda, thanks to civil society led movements and processes in both arenas. Thus, we made an attempt to analyze and foster this project, looking to both the East and the West, in our book. Despite the crisis of welfare states in the 1980s, the embrace of neo-​liberalism by right-​wing and even some left-​wing parties, the increased difficulty of maintaining or expanding social democracy in a context of hyper-​globalization, the achievements regarding democratization and social justice that challenged inequality and destabilized illegitimate social hierarchies were real. Hence, our optimism and hope, not without reason or foundation. Indeed, there were many successes: the end of the imperialist venture of the Vietnam war, civil rights improvements, greater equality for women, and even the rise of green parties in the West; and the fall of Soviet type communism, the dismantling of the Soviet empire (aka the Soviet Union) in the East, culminating in autonomy and what looked like transitions to democracy in many of the countries in Central Eastern Europe. We did not believe in any “end of history” but we could assume real progress all the same. Today, the context couldn’t be more different. We write during the culmination and the aftermath of four years of a right-​wing populist US presidency that engaged in constant norm breaking regarding democratic procedure and liberal constitutionalism. Propaganda techniques were repeatedly used that openly rejected truth, engaged in falsehood, and fostered white nationalism and militia style resistance to the opposition deemed “the enemy” culminating in the insurrection against Congress. We are left with images of a Capitol first desecrated by white supremacist mobs and then surrounded by armed troops that locked down our capital city in order to ensure a safe inauguration of President Biden. The fact that so many believed the lies and still seem to support their perpetrator, indeed his capture of the Republican party (even if the outcome is still unclear), is deeply disturbing and must be analyzed. Things are hardly more encouraging

Preface and Acknowledgments  ix with regard to the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Instead of further democratization, in most of the former Soviet empire we have the survival or emergence of hybrid forms of regimes with a tendency to become fully authoritarian. Russia and some of the former republics of the USSR are in the lead. In parts of Central and Eastern Europe, real progress in democratization is being eviscerated and basically destroyed by populist governments, most obviously in the case of Hungary, but also in Poland. On the periphery of Europe, in Turkey, President Erdogan surpasses even the Hungarian Orbán in the undermining of democracy. In India, a country previously in the vanguard of democratic constitutionalism, a populist prime minister and his party are challenging impressive historical achievements in the name of ethno-​religious nationalism. And yet, at the same time, the outcome of the 2020 US election, an event with obvious international significance, indicates that constitutional democracy can hold and even recover in the face of populist challenge. We write this book to try to understand the logic of populism (in its left and right versions), its link to authoritarianism despite its democratic pretensions and concessions to liberal democracy, and the underlying causes for its current successes in coming to power. We also write it in search of democratic alternatives, very much needed today. The US drama helps renew our hope that with enough civil society pressure for greater social justice, and more democracy, with the help of actors in political society (parties) who insist on the observance of democratic and constitutionalist norms, and with the help of impartial civil servants in the judiciary and in the state administrations whose professional integrity and commitment to their oaths of office matter more than politics and enable them to resist political pressure, democracy can be preserved and democratized: made more inclusive and responsive to the unmet needs and demands of groups. But given the severity of the existing threats, optimism is uncalled for. It will take a great deal of cogent analysis, political prudence, courage, and hard work to fend off the irresponsible firebrands and political opportunists fueling the populist threat, on all sides of the political spectrum. For us, two conclusions follow. First, it is possible to defend democracy, as the new democratic civil and political society actors have shown in the case of the United States, as has the impressive integrity of many involved in the legal and administrative systems of “the state” and the states. And second, defeats of the populist challenge, with its authoritarian logic, cannot be secure without seriously addressing the democracy, welfare, and cultural deficits of really existing liberal democracies. We wish to acknowledge and thank those who have helped us bring this work to fruition. The two authors extensively discussed all of the chapters of this book before and after drafts were written. As a result, they were extensively revised. We both are fully responsible for each of the claims, arguments, and conclusions in the book.

x  Preface and Acknowledgments We received support for this project, individually and jointly by more people than we can possibly mention here. Andrew Arato wishes to thank New School colleagues and especially graduate students who have supported him, both domestic and international, and from whom he is learned a lot concerning all aspects of this topic. I learned a great deal from the work of older students, now professors, in the area of populist studies: Carlos de la Torre, Nicolas Lynch, Alberto Olvera, Enrique Peruzzotti, Martin Plot, Margarita Palacios, Claudia Heiss, and Nicolas Figureoa. De la Torre was especially kind to include me in two edited volumes: The Promise and Perils of Populism (2015); and, my article co-​authored with Jean L. Cohen on “Civil Society, Populism and Religion” in the Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (2019). In recent years it was from young scholars in particular, from Mexico, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, and India, like Melissa Amezcua, Emanuel Guerisoli, Nuri Can Akin, Bahareh Ebne Alian, Arya Vaghayenegar, and Udeepta Chakravarty that I have learned the most. Among the faculty I would single out Richard Bernstein, Dmitri Nikulin, Andreas Kalyvas, Federico Finchelstein, Chiara Bottici, Omri Boehm, Benoit Challand, Carlos Forment, Eli Zaretsky, and provocative debating partner Nancy Fraser for their support. As to institutions, and their leaders, I am especially grateful to Hector Raul Solis Gadea, rector at the University of Guadalajara for repeatedly inviting me to the Guadalajara Book Fair and to the Center of Social Sciences (2013–​2014) he led, along with Jochen Kemner and the CALAS program at the same university and in Costa Rica in 2018 and 2019, who have given me a fellowship and invited me to lecture. I am grateful to Michael Ignatieff and Zoltán Miklósi for inviting me for three lectures at the Central European University in Budapest, 2018, 2019, and 2021, and similarly Paul Blokker and Gábor Attila Tóth at the University of Trento. I thank Gábor Halmai for twice sponsoring me, the second time as a senior Fernand Braudel fellow, at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, and allowing me to learn from him in matters constitutional. Finally, I thank Silvia von Steinsdorff and Ertug Tombus for inviting me to a conference at Humboldt University in Berlin in 2018 and the organizers at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change at the same university who invited me as a visiting fellow during the summer of 2019. Jean L. Cohen would like to thank Columbia University for its generous leave policy enabling her to research and write this book. I would also like to thank the European University Institute for awarding me a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship in 2020 for which I prepared several lectures on populism despite the fact that due to the pandemic I was unable to go to Florence, Italy, to deliver the talks. As I write, the plan is to do so in May 2021, if possible. I am grateful to Rahel Jaeggi for inviting me to be a senior fellow at the Center for the Humanities and Social Change, at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, during the summer of

Preface and Acknowledgments  xi 2019, where I delivered lectures and participated in panels on populism in addition to teaching in the summer school. Of course, I am grateful to my students who have participated in my courses on populism over the past five years. Their insights and the high level of discussion that always occurs in both graduate and undergraduate courses at Columbia helped me clarify my own ideas. The same is true of the conferences where I lectured both abroad and in the United States Again I thank Columbia University for sponsoring several conferences I organized and lectured in on populism. These include the 2017 conference on populism and religion I co-​organized with Alexander Stille, for which I thank the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life (IRCPL), the School of Journalism and the Department of Political Science; the journal Constellations 25th Anniversary Conference Democracy in an Age of Crisis: (co-​organized by myself, Andreas Kalyvas, and Amy Allen) for which I also thank the Columbia University Department of Political Science, and the Center for Critical Theory at Columbia Law School and The New School, for co-​sponsoring. Amongst the many conferences to which I was invited to speak on populism I would like to thank the organizers of the 2019 panel on populism and religion at Sciences Po in Paris (Julie Saada and Astrid von Busekist); the organizers of the 2019 CSPT (Conference for the Study of Political Thought), “Parties, Partisans and Movements,” held at Yale University for including me amongst the paper givers; Ertug Tombus, Jan Werner Muller, Anna Bettin Kaiser, and Sylvia von Steinsdorff for inviting me to speak on populism and the politics of resentment at the 2018 conference at Humboldt University in Berlin; Andreas Kalyvas for inviting me to speak on the panel “Populism” at The New School in 2017; and Artemy Magun of the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia, for inviting me to the conference Civil Society in the XXI Century in Spring 2017, held at the Smolny Institute, Petersburg, where I spoke on populism, civil society, and religion. The introduction of this book draws on Andrew Arato, “Political theology and populism,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 80.1 (2013) and our joint article “Civil Society, Populism and Religion,” Constellations 24.3 (2017). Chapters 1 and 4 draw on Andrew Arato’s “Populism, Constitutional Courts, and Civil Society,” in C. Landfried ed., Judicial Power. How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformations (2019) and “How We Got Here? Transition Failures, Their Causes and the Populist Interest in the Constitution,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 45.9–​10 (2019). Chapter 2 draws on Jean L. Cohen’s “Hollow Parties and their Movement-​ization: The Populist Conundrum,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 45.9–​10 (2019). The introduction and Chapter 5 also draw on Jean L. Cohen’s “Populism and the Politics of Resentment,” Jus Cogens 1.1 (2019). Chapter 3 draws on her “What’s Wrong with the Normative Theory (and the Actual Practice) of Left Populism,” Constellations, 26.3 (2019).

Introduction: Defining Populism Why publish another book on contemporary populism in an already increasingly crowded scholarly field? As authors of several works on civil society, authoritarian regimes, sovereignty, and democratization, we believe that on many relevant issues we have new things to say, with more grounding theoretically than most works on the subject. Indeed, we think that the tradition of critical theory is not yet represented in the growing literature on contemporary populism, amazingly enough given the early interest in authoritarian forms of the founders of the critical theory tradition, and the later important work of the second generation concerning the public sphere and the changing structure of capitalism. We aim to fill this gap. More importantly, most existing works have paid little attention to the subject of democratic alternatives to populist politics. At best, many have assumed or even argued that the only alternative is to defend liberal democracy as it is or to return to this form as it was. Others like Ernesto Laclau, much more questionably, strongly imply, if never fully claim, that the alternative must be a complete replacement of liberal dimensions of representative democracy. We agree with neither of these options. All our chapters will be concerned with the problem of the democratization of democracy1 and several will consider alternatives under headings such as the expansion of the political role of civil society and the reconstruction of social democracy. As critical theorists, we believe that liberal democracy is by its nature an unfinished and incomplete project. Accordingly, the contemporary halting or even reversal of its democratic expansion plays a key role in opening the terrain to populist challenge in its various forms. Thus the political reasons for writing our book are distinct. We doubt that, even in the relatively short run, liberal democracy can be successfully defended by a conservative relation to its contemporary forms, i.e., based on a desired return to liberal parliamentarism or presidentialism as they were in the past. Almost everywhere these are under strain, whether because of internal oligarchic tendencies of representative systems, the decline of party representation, or strong external constraints, due to globalized capitalism, on the ability of democratic states to deliver improvements of social welfare or equal life chances to populations.2 We also do not believe that populism in any of its forms can successfully address what we will call three deficits: those of democracy, welfare, and social solidarity. We will argue, and hopefully show, that the very logic of

2  Populism and Civil Society populism, as we define it and as it exists today in both left and right variants, points to political authoritarianism and inconsistent, arbitrary, poorly thought out, or clientelistic economic and social policies even where, empirically, various tendencies, including populism’s organizational forms that we will note, produce countervailing tendencies.3 Furthermore, as in the case of liberal democracy that we wish to defend through its further democratization, we do not wish to deny that contemporary populism has a point that should be taken seriously. This we see in its critical dimension, especially in the early phase when populism is a movement in civil society. Thus our attitude to both liberal democracy and populism is that of immanent criticism:4 in one case we wish to defend the counterfactual norms against existing forms of institutionalization and in the other the critical dimension against strong authoritarian tendencies that are almost always fully evident when populism achieves political power. Our perspective therefore is to learn from the crises of liberal democracy, of which populism is perhaps the most important if not the only symptom, and to begin to outline alternatives to both liberal conservatism (represented even by many recent forms of social democracy) and populist authoritarianism. This introduction consists of five sections. First, we will consider the methodological tools needed to define the phenomenon of populism. Next, we generate a preliminary definition of the topos through an immanent critique of Ernest’s Laclau’s theory of the same. This will be followed by an attempted correction of the first results through ideal typical construction using three empirically derived criteria: reliance on elections, orientation to constitutional politics, and the utilization of “host ideologies” that are present in virtually all contemporary populisms if they become politically relevant or successful. After having produced an expanded middle-​range definition, that in our view leads to the distinct populist logic, we consider four organization forms populism can take that should not be seen as an inevitable stage model: mobilization, party, government, and regime. We end the introduction with our plan for the five chapters of the book.

What Is Populism? How to Define the Phenomenon Almost everyone acknowledges that populism is a contested and often polemical concept and given the many historical and now ideological forms that have been listed under this term, the great difficulty involved in coming up with a definition that includes neither too much nor too little. There is today a certain convergence among attempts to minimally identify the phenomenon, but this in itself does not produce sufficient conceptual clarity.

Introduction  3 In previous writings, we have relied on two methodologies to help define populism: immanent critique and ideal typical construction. As for the first, following above all Marx’s critique of political economy, we select the best affirmative or ideological theory of a social phenomenon and try to use its main components to develop a new theory that both uncovers dimensions suppressed by the original (“defetishization”) or confronts their normative assumptions with their false realization (“immanent critique of ideology”). Here we have an easier time than Marx, since in his case there were many significant theories of the emerging capitalist economy among which he had to choose the best, according to his judgment and background historical knowledge. In our case populism, whether of the right or the left, seems to have lacked many significant affirmative theorists.5 Fortunately, Ernesto Laclau’s work,6 and the related but different studies of Margaret Canovan and Chantal Mouffe, fill this theoretical or ideological lacuna. It is important for us, insofar as we have always been very critical of populism in light of its supposed authoritarian tendencies, that Laclau, Mouffe, and Canovan all affirm populist politics, if in three different ways, as a significant radical democratic alternative. Our study too is committed to the values of democratic politics, and we study populism with the background assumption, based on cases, that it represents a challenge and even a danger to these very values. We do not however wish to presuppose authoritarianism on a definitional level. Building our definition on elements derived from Ernesto Laclau first and foremost, should protect us against the charge of tautology based on normative commitments. Only if our critical treatment can uncover, on the level of argumentation, the presence of an authoritarian logic that can be demonstrated in terms of most relevant cases, will we be justified in rejecting the democratic claims these authors repeatedly make. Especially Laclau and Mouffe, but also Canovan, open themselves to a critique resembling defetishization, by systematically suppressing the key dimension of populism in governmental power, which must be recovered to understand the telos or “the logic” of the phenomenon better and more deeply. When this is done, the way is open to the critique of ideology. The democratic norms of populist theorists, which seem to be implicit in their critique of really existing liberal democracies, can and should be confronted with the strongly authoritarian tendencies of populist governments and regimes, already decipherable in populist movements. The second methodological move we undertake is more dependent on Max Weber than Karl Marx. Like Weber, we do not endorse Marx’s Hegelian confidence in grasping the essence of the phenomenon in a relatively few developmental elements. Aided by the historical experience of many cases, and their best

4  Populism and Civil Society recent analyses, we can both re-​emphasize those elements from the criticized ideologies that yield a coherent picture of the phenomenon and add to them if it turns out that the immanent criticism of populist theory and ideology left out important dimensions of the phenomenon. Such omissions are likely because Laclau, being mainly a philosopher, has neglected social scientific as well as historical treatments of the phenomenon.7 The resulting combination then must again be tested against both theoretical explorations of origins and causes, as well as the history and tendencies of significant contemporary phenomena often referred to as “populist.” We know, as did Weber, that empirical cases cannot be understood at all without the construction of ideal typical concepts of interpretation, but also that historical experience will rarely fully correspond to the conceptual type. Nevertheless, we do not believe that the selection of cases so interpreted can take place in a value-​free manner. For us, the value that guides our effort is a commitment to political democracy, to liberal democracy as a developmental form, leading us to select those cases where this value has become an important stake in the struggle, whether electoral or on the level of opposing social movements in civil society. It is this relation to value (Weber’s Wertbeziehung) combined with historical knowledge of different contexts that will be essential if the set of types we construct is not to have so few elements as to include too many cases8 and thus risk losing the distinction between populist and popular politics, nor too many and thus exclude important ones where democracy is under challenge.

What Is Populism: Immanent Critique Everyone will agree with the statement that populism is a political phenomenon. Yet how to distinguish it from other political projects? The literature seems to suggest four types of answers: as a strategy, as a style, as a set of organized ideas, or as a discourse, in each version leading to a political logic, whether authoritarian or democratic in the view of specific analysts.9 Immanent critique is methodologically linked to discourses, and it is here that we must therefore begin. It is discursive elements that are stressed by Laclau and the so-​called Essex School. Following Laclau, we must understand discourse as involving both language and action, the predominance of one or the other depending on context and populist actors. We note that populists can but often do not call themselves by this name, and can self-​define according to other ideological borrowings (such host ideologies are discussed further later in the chapter).

Introduction  5 Our critique of Laclau’s text and its theoretical foundations in the work of Carl Schmitt has been carried out elsewhere,10 thus here we can restrict ourselves to the list of the main elements of populism derived from Laclau’s and partially Canovan’s complementary work: 1. An appeal to popular sovereignty as the fundamental norm violated by existing institutions whether liberal democratic or authoritarian.11 2. The rhetorical or ideologically thin construction of the empty signifier of the people in such a way as to construct chains of imagined “equivalence” among a wide heterogeneity of demands, grievances, and constituencies.12 3. The symbolic representation13 of the whole of this construct by a mobilized part.14 4. The embodiment even of this part in a single charismatic leader, with whom the mobilized part of the population has a highly emotional relationship.15 5. The construction of a friend–​enemy dichotomy16 (“the frontier of antagonism”17) between the people so defined and its “other” that is seen as the establishment in power along with its beneficiaries and allies, both internal and external.18 6. The insistence on a strong notion of politics or “the political” along with a disinterest in mere “ordinary” politics or policy; this understanding of politics, often articulated in terms of the constituent (vs. “constituted”) power, is based on will rather than social process as rationally understood. We should stress from the outset, that each of these elements may and do appear in other political projects. It is the combination that is populist, in Laclau’s understanding, and, as we will try to show, authoritarian in its logic.19 He has strong though hardly incontrovertible arguments linking the six dimensions. Popular sovereignty (element 1) as the fundamental norm cannot be politically relevant without the construction first and identification second of the subject whose sovereignty is at stake, “the people.” Given societal plurality and heterogeneity, the subject can be only discursively constructed, by a rhetorical chain that equalizes various demands and injuries, a chain of equivalences (element 2). Mere rhetoric focusing on equality is however too weak to unify “the friend” without the simultaneous construction (and “demonization”) of the antagonist, “the enemy,” and of “the frontier of antagonism” (element 5). Only then by a combination of inclusion and exclusion can the subject, the genuine people, be identified. By its very nature given prior heterogeneity and new antagonism it will only be a part of the population (element 3). Even that part will be too large to speak and to act in a unified manner spontaneously. Thus

6  Populism and Civil Society embodiment in a leader is needed (element 4), a single one if disunity is not to re-​appear in a collegium on top, and a charismatic one if it is to be able to gain recognition from “the bottom,” the mobilized grassroots of the part. Finally, fundamental antagonism is not only to enemy actors but to the system created and dominated by them, often called “the establishment.” Thus (element 6), the stress on the political (le politique), the foundational, or the constituent power follows from the rest, dominated by the imagery of the united people led by and embodied in a charismatic leader. Admittedly, it does not follow that populists should be as disinterested in ordinary politics (la politique) as is Laclau, but if so interested it would have to be for instrumental reasons. But it does follow that the constituent power should not be a one-​time act exhausted by a constitution, but a permanent possibility often exercised even under a new constitution.20 It is important for theoretical reasons to stress the combination of the elements in the definition. In our view some of them can exist apart from populism under alternative interpretations. Meeting one or two of the criteria here, like the related stresses on popular sovereignty (1) and the constituent power (6), may be positive characteristics of democratic politics in other respects strongly opposed to populism, charismatic embodiment, and friend–​enemy antagonism. Almost all versions of constitutional democracy allow and even promote popular (vs. populist) leadership and leave room for the constituent power of citizens, which can however be exercised in highly democratic ways involving pluralism and self-​limitation.21 Even the very common discourse referring to “the people” (2) can be harmless or rhetorically productive if understood as a plurality rather than a unified subject. It is its being combined with (3), (4), and (5), representation of the whole by a part, embodiment in a charismatic leader, and friend–​ enemy relations that leads to the populist interpretation of these dimensions, which are capable of alternative democratic interpretations. Probably, many relevant cases will miss one of the elements: (1) and (6) are the most likely candidates, based on empirical experience, though some argue that charismatic leadership can also be dispensed with.22 It is the combination of (3) part for the whole dialectic, (4) embodiment, and (5) friend–​enemy juxtaposition that is most central, and for some it may be enough for a “minimal definition”23 usable for today’s main cases. But, logically, they need the scaffolding of a “thin ideology” rooted in the deep-​seated imaginary of the democratic age to be persuasive, and, at the very least when radically challenging the existing system, the idea of re-​foundation or appeal to the constituent power is almost always implied.24 Certainly the logic of populism is inherent in this combination. There is however also the question of which elements are stressed in a given case, and this will vary depending in particular on whether

Introduction  7 the examined phase of populism is that of a movement, government, or regime. Thus element 1, leading to a critique of existing democracies, will be strongest in the movement phase, while the insistence on foundation and re-​foundation may be the strongest when a populist government encounters or discovers the need to form a new regime.

What Is Populism: Construction of the Ideal Type Even if the six elements derived from Laclau have internal relations more common to structural analyses, they also yield an ideal typical construction. As such they raise two methodological questions from the point of view of empirical social science: are there too many elements here to include all relevant cases today and in history, and conversely are there very important regularities that are not yet included? The first objection represents the point of view of Cas Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, who strongly advocate a minimal definition,25 and is implicitly present in many interpreters own attempts, whether they stress discourse, ideology, or strategy as the key to populism. These interpreters are not entirely wrong, a construct with too many components would include too few cases, tendentially only a single historical case.26 Social science, unlike historiography, needs to be comparative and must analyze both the similarities and differences of many cases. At the same time, there are strong theoretical and normative-​political objections to the proposal of minimalism. By excluding the leader embodying the whole and the part/​whole problem, Mudde and Kaltwasser neglect the deep internal connection of these elements to what they stress, namely to fundamental antagonism and speaking in the name of the general will. Furthermore, too few criteria would necessarily lead to the inclusion of too many cases, thus compromising the important differences between what has been called pre-​populism, classical, and contemporary forms. More importantly, on the level of politics many grassroots democratic forms would be included, thus losing the possibility of distinguishing between the popular and the populist. Yes, it may be necessary to distinguish (if possible) within populisms of grassroots vs. top down origins,27 but even then it takes a consideration of other criteria beyond what minimalism can provide to discover the different and even contrary logics between populism from below and non-​populist democratic mobilizations in civil society.28 This brings us to the second possible objection to some definitions, namely of leaving out too much that may be fundamental. Here alternative minimalist explanations speak against one another, and necessarily so. Since some focus on discourse generally or ideology and even style more narrowly, while others on

8  Populism and Civil Society strategy and practice, we have the right to ask whether any of these dimensions should be neglected by either side, and why a combination of discourse, ideology, style, strategy, and logic should not be preferable. This is also an objection against Laclau and our list of elements derived from him, because even if his notion of discourse includes practice, it does not include strategy of coming to power.29 All politics whether “normal” or “extraordinary” (“the political”)30 has a strategic dimension, aiming at the weakening of the hold of rivals on power and/​or displacing them. The strategic dimension of populism has been defined variously. According to Kurt Weyland, populism is best defined “as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, un-​institutionalized support from a large number of mostly unorganized followers.”31 This too is a fairly minimal definition, whose most important component is mobilization in the service of attaining or keeping power. Yet, by excluding this dimension, the question of populism installed in power does not even come up for Laclau, strangely enough, in spite of his documented interest in advising and supporting populists in power, whether the Kirchners or Chavez.32 The strategic dimension will be important for us in three forms of power: party, government, and regime.33 Yet, minimal definitions based on strategy or insistence on style34 may occlude the difference between populism and other political forms: fascism in the case of strategy and mass cultural democracy in the case of (media) style. Thus advocates of the strategic conception, like Kenneth Roberts, criticize minimalist self-​limitation for blurring the distinction between populism and other forms of social and political mobilization. His own definition (or one of them) of populism as an “appeal to popular sovereignty where political authority is widely deemed to be detached, unrepresentative or unaccountable to the common people”35 is itself fairly minimal even if complemented elsewhere by focusing on mobilization achieved through an anti-​ elite, anti-​establishment discourse. Nevertheless, the introduction of versions of the strategic conception in a field dominated by discursive and ideational models points us well beyond any version of minimalism.36 Thus the second objection, applicable to our own scheme derived from Laclau, of leaving out too much, can only be answered by a full survey of the literature that we cannot undertake, given its exponential growth even as we write. So we focus on two additions, both related to the strategic dimension, that at the very least can be seen as ultimately instrumental.37 One is the electoral aspect linked also to constitutional politics, the other is the need for what has been called host ideologies. Together these allow the differentiation of populism from authoritarian doctrines of the past (and possibly the future). The stress on host ideologies will also help to conceptualize the internal differences among populisms.

Introduction  9 Undoubtedly, the insistence of contemporary populisms on competitive elections as roads to power and as a practice in power is one key element and sign that differentiates these from classical forms of authoritarian politics. While it may be possible to derive the electoral demand from the notion of popular sovereignty, we have to stress that the latter notion together with charismatic embodiment, friend–​enemy relations, and part–​whole representation (that could take symbolic rather than accountable forms) may do without electoral claims and justifications. Laclau indeed adopts the notion of symbolic representation from Hanna Pitkin’s list and nowhere stresses leaders exposing themselves to tests (Manin’s “retrospective judgment”), or in her language “giving account.”38 Nevertheless, Federico Finchelstein is right, along with several others, in claiming that the major distinction of populism from fascism since Peron at least lies in this dimension.39 In his historical reconstruction, Finchelstein rightly attributes populist self-​differentiation to the strong post–​World War II international taboos against fascist extreme violence. Thus, according to him, leaders and parties with clearly fascist origins, like Peron in Argentina and the Front National in France, were able to redefine themselves in more benign terms by insisting on replacing (at least partially!) collective violence by electoral competition. The stress on the importance of elections for populism in acquiring and staying in power, should be complemented by an even more surprising insistence on constitutional politics, whether in the form of writing, amending, or interpreting written constitutions. The stress is surprising, given the great emphasis of populists on popular sovereignty, embodied in a leader or a government, and the general hostility to constitutional restraints and limitations. It is however logically clear that elections with some competitive elements, even referenda, require prior rules for their procedures, even if they may be violated in practice. Such rules presuppose constitutions at least in the minimal sense that can be provided by statutes or executive decrees. In general however the legitimacy of elections and referenda, both domestic and international, requires written constitutional and (materially constitutional!) electoral rules also under populist governments. Here the difference to fascism is most striking,40 but populists are also very different from communist regimes to whom constitutions were a mere façade, hiding rather than revealing the actual maps of power.41 Populist constitutions are real power maps, “nominal constitutions” with the proviso that ultimately they leave a great deal of discretionary space to the popular will embodied in the government that can easily change or by-​pass the formal rules in either emergencies or episodes of constitution amending or replacement. Populism need not break with all the characteristics of fascism, but there must be a break that has visible marks or characteristics. Constitutional politics represents one such visible break. As we have seen, Finchelstein stresses the

10  Populism and Civil Society rejection of extreme violence as complementary to the affirmation of elections, in principle non-​violent forms of attaining and keeping power. Given the history of communist state terrorism and repression and the reduction of elections to empty rituals, the same can be said, in our view, concerning the difference with communism. The shift goes both ways. We need to understand the two “totalitarian” forms as different from populisms in spite of their anticipations of several of the dimensions of the conception we rely on: charismatic leadership, friend–​enemy relations, part–​whole dialectic, and the implicit though not explicit reliance on constituent power. Yes, even their forms of discourse often sounded very populist indeed, as can be explicitly seen in the case of Mao.42 The fiction of the nation could be said to be a substitute for that of the people and class could be explicitly complemented by references to the working people, sometimes just “the people.”43 Both fascism and communism have used electoral competition and tactics under the protections of inherited constitutions before coming to power, which however always involved revolutionary or regime changing results if not legal ruptures. Yet populisms too often claim to have come to power in “legal” revolutions (Orbán’s revolution of the voting booth; Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution) a term that is also relevant to the rise of Mussolini and Hitler to power.44 While in the case of the Communists revolutionary breaks or coups d’état were required, if we can speak of coups in the populist victories, these are generally hidden by formal rule following or at least validation by apex courts (Peron and Fujimori represent exceptions). What is important here however is that both fascism and communism, once in power, completely eliminate genuine electoral competition. Populisms on the other hand not only maintain, almost without exception, the institution of at least partially competitive elections but have in many cases dramatically increased their frequency in several forms, ordinary and extraordinary, including but not limited to plebiscites and referenda.45 Not only possibly reluctant rejections of fascism and communism or concessions to liberal democracy are involved. Here the reference to a particular interpretation of popular sovereignty, in terms of embodiment of the people’s will in the leader, may be helpful. As Max Weber has insisted, charisma is a highly vulnerable form of legitimacy, but can be shored up under modern conditions by plebiscitary acclamation that represents a sort of asymmetric dialogue between leaders and followers. Coupled with popular sovereignty claims, the followers have to be expanded to a sufficiently large number to be able to plausibly speak in the name of the people. Even demonstrations have limits in terms of numbers. Here is the origin and reason of the populist preference for plebiscites and referenda, where a numerical popular majority can be achieved. Populisms are always majoritarian, as they have to be in divided and plural societies where there is neither unity nor a single voice of the people.46 Yet

Introduction  11 populisms are also monist insofar as the people and their will is perforce unified and embodied in a leader (charismatic or not) who incarnates their supposed unity. Elections, even ordinary ones, are the solution to the apparent contradiction. They turn the voice of the majority, however structured, into plebiscites on individual leaders, rather than votes on alternative programs or past performance, allowing those leaders to claim their identity with the people and their will.47 Populism in other words does not abolish but decisively transforms elections. There is of course a risk. Completely free and fair elections can be lost, even by a popular and charismatic leader, as Indira Gandhi found out in 1977 against her expectations. There are however ways to diminish the risk, by limiting competing parties, reducing the freedom of the press, attacking civil society institutions, manipulating electoral rules to produce incumbent advantage, controlling electoral commissions and eliminating exit polling, and even (as in Turkey recently) changing the constitution from a parliamentary to a presidential one, since direct elections of the head of state and government increases the plebiscitary dimension. While all populist incumbents engage in some of these tactics, it may be difficult to find the threshold where elections are no longer competitive. Even the term competitive authoritarianism refers to such a hybrid situation, with the genus being authoritarian, and the differentia competitive.48 What is certain is that populism, whether emerging from below, or much more likely from above,49 seeks to develop and maintain what has been called “plebiscitary linkage” at the expense of genuine political competition that is however difficult to eliminate, because plebiscitary legitimacy itself requires constant testing and refurbishing. It is however generally easier to prevail in elections than to produce the results that plebiscitary leaders almost always promise, generally without the ability to deliver. Elections thus can be ways of avoiding rather than testing accountability. Therefore, stress on competitive elections, absent in the neo-​Bolshevik vision of Laclau, but present in the work of Mouffe, should be added to the criteria developed here, as the seventh defining feature.50 Thus while historically and at times biographically related (e.g., in the cases of Peron and Le Pen), once in power populism and fascism and populism and communism can be differentiated most visibly by the electoral criterion. Given that all these political forms can use elections to come to power, even more important in our view is the ideological difference. In our definition the construction of a chain of equivalence reliant on embodiment and intense antagonism yields only what has been called a “thin ideology.”51 Fascism and communism possess well-​developed, “thick” ideologies linked to normative visions of the good society, philosophies of history, sociological strata, and geo-​political threats. Here lies one reason for their mobilizational potential in their movement phase that is not compromised by lost elections, nor does it require elections at all in the

12  Populism and Civil Society governmental phase. The asymmetrical dialogue between leader and led is not only charismatic but also ideological. Populism, to compensate, not only needs electoral success but, as it has been well shown by Mudde and Kaltwasser, ideological alliances, host ideologies, without however transforming itself into purely ideological movement or ideocratic rule. Being able to flexibly draw on host ideologies, switching between them, even eclectically combining them is an important advantage of populist leaders and politics. The conception of host ideologies also helps us differentiate among populisms, those on the left, the right, and even those that deny the distinction and eclectically draw on both traditions. Left and right populisms can of course be distinguished under our criterion 5, according to who is defined as the enemy: the country’s elites (“establishment”; oligarchy) only or also an under-​ class, racial, religious, ethnic, or immigrant. But to exclude any of the latter from the people is difficult to justify under an empty signifier, constructed by a chain of supposed equivalences, in other words a thin ideology. Thus the idea of a host ideology is an important contribution to both the internal differentiation of populisms and the understanding of their motivational power.52 Here too the historical link to fascism and authoritarian socialism again becomes evident, since ethno or cultural nationalism on the right and state socialism on the left are the most important host ideologies, at least so far. But these are not the only hosts possible. Religion too can play this role, mostly on the right, but sometimes on the left,53 and as Chantal Mouffe’s recent work reveals, so can imaginably liberal democracy understood as an ideology, rather than a set of political procedures or even the enactment of enforceable civil or social rights.54 Social democracy and neo-​liberalism too can become hosts as we have seen in Latin America after World War II, for the first, and in the 1990s for the second. As these examples indicate, there are always possible tensions between host and parasite, most obvious in the case of populist attempts to rely on liberal democracy, which lead to serious internal contradictions with the whole ideal type derived from Laclau.55 The need to rely on host ideologies, some of which are evidently well developed and “thick,” does not vitiate the consequences of ideological thinness. Assuming that there is always a need for a host, something Laclau does not explicitly admit, he is very clear,56 clearer than most populists, that it is relatively easy to “float” in effect from one host to another. This is his very important theory of the floating signifier that asserts the instability of a name like “the people” or “the revolution” or even “the nation” allowing political shifts from one political leadership to another, from one construction of the enemy to another, as his example of the relation of communist electorate to the supporters of the Front National in France (renamed in June 2018 as the Rassemblement Nationale by

Introduction  13 Marine le Pen) indicates. Populism has no developed normative theory, no philosophy of history, no strong sociological anchoring in a class, and thus Laclau is forced to imply that it will be highly contingent factors like charisma and rhetoric (and perhaps the psychology of disappointment?) that will decide whether there is floating or not in societies where there are many actual or potential political actors. If his intention in developing the notion of the floating signifier was to promote floating from right to left, or to block the reverse, he conspicuously fails to provide a theory for how either is to be accomplished. We are ready to present a second version of our ideal typical definition of populism, the first having been the result of our immanent critique of Laclau’s reconstruction of the populist construct of the people. Here that version is supplemented by three key additions: the stress on a common strategic dimension, the inclusion of the need for host ideologies, and the need for electoral self-​ justification. Accordingly, in a somewhat reduced version: 1. Populism is a strategy of political mobilization for attaining or retaining, or at the very least strongly influencing, governmental power, by an appeal to popular sovereignty as the fundamental norm said to be violated by existing or previous institutions whether liberal democratic or authoritarian; 2. By the rhetorical or ideologically thin construction of the empty signifier of the people in such a way as to construct “chains” of imagined “equivalence” among a wide heterogeneity of demands, grievances, and constituencies—​ to succeed, reliance on almost any available “thick” ideology as “host,” whether nationalism, socialism, religion or neo-​liberalism is required. 3. By the symbolic representation of the whole of “the people” by a mobilized part. 4. By the embodiment even of this part, typically in a single charismatic leader with whom the mobilized part of the population has a highly emotional relationship and interaction. 5. By the construction of a friend–​enemy dichotomy57 (“the frontier of antagonism”58) between the people so defined and its “other” seen as the establishment in power along with its beneficiaries and allies, internal and external.59 6. By insistence on a strong notion of politics, or “the political,” and a disinterest in mere “ordinary” politics or policy, which understanding of politics, often articulated in terms of the constituent (vs. “constituted”) power, is based on will rather than social process as rationally understood. 7. By valorizing and maintaining electoral competition (elections, referenda, plebiscites) or its plausible appearance.

14  Populism and Civil Society

Different Populisms: Mobilization, Party, Government, and Regime The ideal typical definition cannot disguise the existence of different populisms as revealed by the “attaining or retaining” of element 1, the variety of possible host ideologies of 2, the possibility of different types (and number) of enemies in 5, and the difference between competitive elections and their appearance in 7. The most common differentiation in the literature is between populism of the left and the right, which pertains to two issues: the choice of enemy and that of a host ideology. Being left or right in terms of one of these criteria however does not automatically imply the other, and we have now seen in France for example a populism with two enemies, the “elite” and the immigrant subalterns, combined with a strong defense of the welfare state at least as far as “genuine French” citizens are concerned. Alberto Fujimori’s populism, conversely, combined a neo-​liberal economic strategy with appeals to the people including and even especially subaltern strata. Moreover, the fact of “floating” stressed by Laclau, the claim of many populists of being beyond traditional political distinctions, and the common eclectic borrowings from both traditions makes grouping between left and right populisms very difficult, if politically almost unavoidable. There are important interpreters who attempt to differentiate various populisms on the bases of origins: mobilization from below and mobilization from above.60 Even if we add a third possible origin, the in-​between level of political parties, there are problems also with this form of making the distinction. First, there is a debate on whether genuine populism should include both or all three forms. We think it should include both forms of mobilization, as long as the main criteria of our definition, its discursive and strategic dimensions are satisfied. But, more importantly, if the distinction between left and right has become difficult in the case of many populisms, the same is true for the question of origins: whether a populism emerges from the grassroots or from a power position above. While there may be cases of pure mobilization from either below or, more commonly, above, in most significant cases both will be involved. One might imagine a sequence between initial mobilization from below, followed by expansion led by parties, governments, or both. The sequence then would be movement (or: mobilization), party, government, and regime.61 A movement would then come first, followed by party formation, and then assuming electoral victory, a populist government. Finally, only a populist government is in the position to create a new regime while keeping the populist discourse, first a hybrid one and then, at least potentially, an outright authoritarian regime, possibly in new historical forms. In reality the process can start from above or from the in-​between level. An initial, independent movement stage rarely emerges, while mobilization

Introduction  15 resembling movement forms can be created by an already existing party, as with the FN or now RN in France and FIDESZ in Hungary, or by a government, as in the case of Chavismo in Venezuela. This is why we now prefer to speak about populism as mobilization rather than movement. We do not dismiss the possibility of genuine self-​mobilization from below, but insist that this “stage” can be skipped altogether. More rarely, the same can be said about even a party, at least in presidential settings like Peru and Ecuador, where a charismatic figure could win election without a genuine, organized party. And, assuming coming to power through rupture like a coup d’état, a party or a movement leader can immediately begin the construction of a hybrid populist regime without having to put up with the conflicts of other branches and constitutional safeguards. In a word, origins help us to understand the nature and specific type of the populist challenge but do not provide clear enough distinction among forms of populism. But they do fortunately call our attention to the different organizational forms that give us better clues to the logic of differentiation. A grassroots movement or even a mobilization that resembles its forms are different from an electorally organized party, and the possession of one or another power of government in a liberal democratic regime is different from the occupation of all power institutions in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. A movement type of organization that even mobilization from above often mimics is a relatively loose network of mobilized or mobilizable individuals, who may participate for heterogeneous reasons. Whether emerging from below or created from above, movements can have very different components ideologically and normatively. What unites them are rhetorics or narratives that always involve opposition to an antagonist whether itself a movement, a party, or a government. All populism involves a critique of established political forms, but this critical dimension especially of liberal democracy (or: oligarchy) is particularly strong in populist mobilization. We leave political parties and their definition for later discussion, but note here only the obvious dimensions of greater organizational coherence, the maintenance of greater discursive uniformity than movements, and in particular the defining role of strategy for attaining power, generally through elections but possibly in preparation for a coup or a “revolution.” The strategic orientation that is more important than the discursive one for parties, is even more in focus when populists achieve governmental power. If this is achieved in elections under a given constitution, populist governments have to try to control and defeat other inherited branches and institutions of guarantee. As long as some kind of even partially competitive elections are retained for the legitimating of mobilizing purposes, we can speak of governmental forms of populism. This as we will see can take two forms: “in” government vs. “the” government.62 If only the executive is fully captured, as in the United States in most of the Trump era, populism is only “in” government,

16  Populism and Civil Society though according to its unitary definition of the embodied people will contest or try to capture other governmental branches. Such conquest can be achieved whether by electing a new (usually constituent) assembly as in Venezuela and Ecuador, court packing as in Poland, or the combination of these methods as in Hungary and Turkey. However the result is achieved, we can speak of populism as “the” government. At this point, the threshold is in the process of being crossed from a democratic to a hybrid populist political system. But only when the (originally) populist government can no longer lose an election,63 when no fundamental rights are respected, and no political alternatives can be articulated at all, can we speak of a shift to an authoritarian regime, generally also a hybrid one in the sense of retaining elections and documentary constitutions on the purely formal level. We have already said that despite the logic and even empirical examples of a sequence among these four forms, we are not postulating a stage model. Empirically at least, stages can be both reversed or skipped in our understanding of the many relevant cases. The sequence of mobilization or movement, party, “in” government, “the” government, and regime, is at best a logical one. Given populist discourse, and especially the stress on the unity of the people and its uncompromising hostility to an enemy, a populist mobilization even from below logically implies becoming a party, the party, the government, and the government a regime. The individual stages as we said may be followed or skipped or fail to be realized. But even in the latter case, such simple logical relations between the forms hide essential continuities, or the combination of replacement with the preservation of the other forms. A movement, especially when organized from above, can already have a core of a proto-​party within its ranks, trying to stimulate greater organizational integrity, hierarchy, and discursive homogeneity. Populist parties, as we will show in ­chapter 2, are typically movement parties that organize activist members and voters according to looser hierarchical links and greater ideological freedom than the party’s core or vanguard. The latter is already an anticipation of the government executive within most parties. Populist governments, even when they come to power without a genuine party, try to create such an organization as well as to maintain or even create the movement, but generally controlled and directed from above. Interestingly, the dimension critical of previous political forms, dominant for populist movements, is maintained not only for populist parties in opposition, but even populist governments that often blame previous administrations, or hidden powers like the now famous “deep state,” for their inevitable failures. Thus movement and party forms are maintained for populist governments for electoral, justificatory, and legitimating purposes. Only with populist regimes that have crossed the threshold to an authoritarian regime can this logic of cancellation–​preservation be possibly suspended. Yet, there is no current case of a consolidated populist

Introduction  17 regime that has broken its continuity with populism as the government. With these considerations in mind, our book stresses organizational forms of populism and their relationships to one another. We will show both that each of these forms has a somewhat different relationship to the normative problems of democracy, democratization, and the possibility that populism in all its forms ultimately signifies an authoritarian turn that must and can be resisted.

The Plan of the Book We have addressed the difficulties surrounding the contested concept of populism, explicated our methodology, and provided a working definition of the phenomenon in this introduction. We turn next, in ­chapter 1, to the question of how we got here. Populism is, first and foremost, a response to the political contradictions of modern constitutional democracy (i.e., of representative government), but we maintain that populisms do and indeed must respond to some combination of cultural and economic deficits, resorting to various host ideologies in order to do so. Populist projects are thus co-​terminus with modern democracy, emerging and re-​emerging intermittently, at times generating large mobilizations and gaining access to power. At other times however, populists fail to garner real support or to enter government. Thus it is important to ask why populist movements and parties are so prevalent and so successful in the contemporary period. Accordingly, we proceed in c­ hapter 1, “Why and Why Now?” by analyzing three time frames for assessing the long term (structural phenomena), middle term (crisis tendencies), and short term (contextual) factors that constitute the political opportunity structure for populist mobilizations to emerge and succeed (or fail). And we focus on three levels of “contradiction” in modernity, political, cultural, and economic, approaching populist mobilization in terms of “supply” and “demand” with respect to existing grievances and frames for articulating them.64 We argue that on the long-​term, structural level, there is a permanent opening in modern democracy for populism to emerge thanks to the inevitable tension between projects to realize and concretize both popular sovereignty and constitutionalism. Since representative democracy can always be made more democratic, more inclusive, more just, populism’s point of entry is in the gaps, the slowness, and the possible reversals in the dynamic of democratization. The seductiveness of populist politics lies in claims by political entrepreneurs that they can close the gaps through direct representation, full inclusion of the “authentic people,” and the return of their sovereignty to them. They gain support for their imagined rejection of limits to the democratic people’s will, rhetorically pitting popular sovereignty against constitutionalism. The medium term pertains

18  Populism and Civil Society to crisis tendencies, which may also have structural causes but are always manifested in specific conjunctures and on multiple levels: political, cultural, and economic. We argue that populist rhetoric and mobilization respond to but also help produce these crises. Capitalizing on the “demand” based on perceptions of mal-​representation, lack of solidarity with certain social strata fearing and/​or enduring status decline, and welfare shortfalls, populist rhetoric radicalizes the deficits through a discourse that relies on the friend–​enemy frame. This allows populist political entrepreneurs to “supply” an identity for each pole, to polarize the population, and to mobilize the “friend” component against the “enemy”—​ the so-​called establishment and its beneficiaries. While the demand for populist politics should be addressed in terms of middle-​term potentials for crises, the supply formula pertains most aptly to short-​term phenomena that convert tendencies into actual crises and conflicts. Here we look especially at the bait and switch strategies of parties with left-​ wing traditions (social democratic or economic populist) that join cartel-​like arrangements once in government and switch over to structural adjustment and austerity policies, thereby opening the door to populist critiques. Bait and switch politics of parties in government can be represented as the loss of supply for a demand that is still salient in the population, thus opening the “market niche” for new parties articulating economic populism and an anti-​establishment rhetoric of betrayal, while supplying populist frames for articulating and exacerbating cultural, social, political, and economic deficits, anxieties, and cleavages. We address the problem of distinguishing between demand and supply in populist mobilization, rejecting both voluntarism and essentialism regarding societal cleavages and antagonisms. The chapter ends with a look at populist use of the media (old and new) for mobilization purposes in civil society. Populists seem to excel at using the advanced forms of technology like the internet and social media to their advantage. They make use of all media from print to television and talk radio, but they are especially skillful in using the internet and social media along with capitalizing on changes in older forms such as the emergence of 24-​hour cable TV “news” networks. The decentralized structure both of cable television and especially the internet allows for differentiated strategies of appeal to different audiences. These can be extreme, radical, and even violent appeals to part of the base but also more moderate appeals to traditional activists who are disaffected by established parties on the right or the left. The general mediatization of politics, the creation of segmented audiences, and the speed of the new communication technologies facilitate manipulation and the spread of fake news and untruths, while enabling populists to undermine trust in authoritative news sources. Indeed the mediatization of politics generally favors populist mobilization. Although all parties make use of old and new media, their use by populists is especially important for their claims to embody the will of the

Introduction  19 people, via direct participation in older plebiscitary forms or in populist digital platform and networked parties. At issue is not only the rhetoric or the plausibility and seductiveness of the narratives offered, but also the dynamics produced by anti-​establishment, populist movements and parties seeking to fill the available political space. Chapter 2, “Populism as Mobilization and as a Party,” focuses on those dynamics by analyzing the distinctive logic of populist movements and, especially, parties. Our specific concern is the impact of successful populist parties on party systems, on other parties, and on the political norms and practices of political competition and cooperation in democratic polities. We argue that, despite being situated within the democratic imaginary, the populist worldview and logic involve the creation of a specific form of anti-​establishment, anti-​party party and a mode of party politics that undermines instead of enhancing democracy. We articulate the relevant features of the populist worldview and the way it impacts the type of movements and parties that populists form (anti-​party, catchall, movement parties), and how they operate in the party system generally. It is our thesis that populists perforce develop a specific type of movement party that typically presents itself as an anti-​party party that intentionally blurs the distinct logics of social movements and political parties—​the logic of influence and of power respectively. Thanks to the populist worldview and logic, parties in government while remaining populist cannot (and will not) deescalate their movement style rhetoric, tactics, or posturing, nor do they renounce outbidding and demonization of the opposition. This makes compromise impossible and responsible governance very unlikely. While populists did not invent the movement party type, or cause the hollowing out and movementization of parties generally—​trends we analyze—​they exacerbate these trends. Indeed their version of the movement party has distinctive features and dynamics. After analyzing the distinct logic of social movements and political parties we look into the development of movement and party forms and analyze the preferred populist party form—​the movement-​party—​and the distinct dynamics of the populist version of this. We then show how particular features of the populist worldview and logic, that we have stressed in our definitions, lead toward the development of a new kind of anti-​system party and party dynamics deleterious to democratic party systems. We identify and discuss four specific dynamics that populism unleashes with regard to political organization: the re-​factionalization of political parties following from the pars pro toto logic; the friend–​enemy conception of politics fostering a form of severe affective political polarization; the anti-​establishment stance turning populist parties into a distinctive type of catch-​all movement party instigating the movementization of populist parties generally; and finally, once in government, the anti–​status quo orientation of populist parties

20  Populism and Civil Society undergirding their willingness to eviscerate democratic norms, constitutionalist principles, the rule of law, and minority rights if these are deemed antithetical to the requirements of enacting the will of the sovereign people. We address the first three dynamics in c­ hapter 2 and turn to the fourth in c­ hapter 3. Chapter 3, “Populist Governments and Their Logic,” focuses on populism in power. While many have noted that populists in government tend to eviscerate constitutional democracy, few have paid attention to the different phases or stages of populism in power or to their distinctive dynamics. Nor has there been adequate analysis of whether populists in government generate regime change and how to characterize the shifts and nature of the regime(s) they morph into. Chapter 3 aims to do just that, focusing on the arrival into and exercise of power by populists in democratic regimes. We argue that once they enter government, populist politicians, if they remain populist, ultimately tend toward regime change, in three stages. To see this, we must distinguish analytically (and empirically) between populism “in” government and populism as “the” government. The former, the first stage, entails the presence in and control by populists of at least one institutional branch of government, most commonly the executive. We situate this stage within the democratic regime type, noting however, that populists in government constantly engage in a process of hybridization, i.e., mixing authoritarian practices and norms into formally democratic institutions, and we describe these processes. But here hybridization refers to the government and the strategies and processes populists unleash to reshape the norms of political competition and governance within a democratic regime. The second stage, populism as “the government,” involves the control by a populist leadership of all or most of the key governmental institutions: the executive, the legislature, and the courts, including the highest courts. Our thesis is that populism has an authoritarian logic, one that moves toward, quickly or slowly, a distinctive hybrid political form once populists become the government that we call the populist hybrid regime. This hybrid combines democratic and constitutional forms with authoritarian practices undermining democratic norms so extensively that it should no longer to be classified as a democratic regime. Populism as “the” government should be seen neither as a constitutional democracy nor as an authoritarian dictatorship: it is a hybrid regime borrowing formal (but never entirely formal!) elements from the first and many (but never all) actual practices from the second. Finally, we raise the question of whether populist authoritarianism can lead to a second shift or transition from the populist hybrid over to a full-​fledged populist authoritarian regime. We discuss this possible third stage and what it would entail, arguing that it would no longer be populist (except in rhetoric) but rather tantamount to a dictatorship in which elections are a sham and constitutions no longer limit the exercise of power, especially executive.

Introduction  21 We are aware that the transition between the three types of regime—​ democratic to hybrid to authoritarian—​raises important threshold issues. We argue that the transitions can be slow, involving incremental hybridization processes, but that at some point quantity turns into quality and regime change does occur. We thus construct ideal types of each regime (democratic, populist hybrid, and dictatorship) in order to facilitate the assessment of empirical cases with respect to the degrees of realization of the authoritarian logic inherent in populism and the two thresholds mentioned earlier. To that end we return again to the concept of democracy and clarify its procedures, principles, norms, prerequisites, internal dynamics, and tensions in order to pinpoint how populist government derogates from it while maintaining its outward forms and processes. We analyze the dynamics and process by which populist governments eviscerate, or “hybridize,” democracy by mixing it with authoritarian practices and norms. We intervene in the comparative politics literature on hybrid regimes, adopting the concept of hybrid regime and refining it so that it becomes clear, unlike in existing taxonomies, a genuinely hybrid regime cannot be situated as a subtype either under democratic regimes (qualified democracy) or under authoritarian regimes (qualified authoritarianism). We engage most directly and critically with the theories of delegative and illiberal democracy in the former taxonomy and competitive authoritarianism in the latter. We think that it matters how populist governments are classified, because the dynamics of each stage are distinct as are the possible forms of resistance to them (discussed in ­chapter 5). It is crucial to avoid two classificatory mistakes: those that serve to legitimate what are really no longer democratic regimes, as the concept “illiberal democracy” tends to do, and those that too quickly classify populist governments as authoritarian regimes, as the term competitive authoritarianism does, losing the specificity of the dynamics, contradictions, constraints and possibilities in such hybrids. Finally we argue that the threshold to dictatorship (possible but not inevitable) can be crossed resulting in another regime change, although this step is still rare in the contemporary period (Putin’s Russia and Maduro’s Venezuela today). Conceptually we maintain that this threshold is crossed when the will of the populist executive or better, the prerogative state, systematically trumps legal and constitutional norms (the normative state); renders democratic elections a mere sham (the populist ruler cannot lose); and uses the remnants of constitutionalist institutions and the constitution itself to map out, and possibly even partially conceal, but in no way limit the pinnacles of power. Chapter 4, “Populist Constitutional Politics,” turns to the theoretical issues, definitional and causal, involved in the fraught relationship between populism and constitutionalism. After having discussed in ­chapter 3 the ways in which populists “in” and as “the” government hybridize democracy through

22  Populism and Civil Society discriminatory legalism, by packing apex courts and by altering or replacing constitutions, it is worth looking more closely at the relationship between populism and constitutionalism. It has become standard for analysts to assume an inherent tension or even contradiction between populism and liberal constitutionalism. But is constitutionalism identical to the liberal variant? And does populism conflict with constitutionalism tout court? The answer to these questions is complex, conceptually and empirically. After all populists “in” and as “the” government pay enormous attention to constitutions, seeking in appearance to “rebalance” the main dimensions of constitutional democracy, rather than reject constitutionalism altogether. We argue that the long-​term foundation at the heart of the populist project lies the fundamental tension within constitutional democracy itself, between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, a tension that can be both reduced or exploited. Unlike classical authoritarians, populists “in” but especially as “the” government purport to resolve that tension rather than abolishing it altogether. In so doing they invariably attack the institutions and safeguards of liberal constitutionalism, but simultaneously exhibit great interest in constitutions and constitutional courts, at times writing new constitutions or amending existing ones. However, populist constitutional change is hardly tantamount to improvement in the quality of constitutionalism, even if in some instances it seems to formally provide more participation and to involve “the people” more directly in constitutional politics. Populism (especially but not only in opposition) has sometimes been represented as endorsing “popular” or “political” constitutionalism by targeting the “counter-​majoritarian” institutions of “liberal constitutions” that they allege unfairly entrench “elites” or establishment power to the detriment of the will of popular majorities. We scrutinize this relationship and the possible overlaps between popular and populist “constitutionalism” in the dimension of the critique of the liberal or legal type. A key thesis of this chapter is that the result of such efforts is not only authoritarian deformation or hybridization of inherited constitutional democracy, but also the renewal and exacerbation of the very tension between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism. That tension could disappear only with the step from a populist hybrid regime to a new authoritarian one. What is clear is that populist parties and leaders in opposition and then in power engage in constitutional politics by challenging the legitimacy of constitutional courts. They also use formal efforts to replace or amend existing constitutions or capture apex courts along with informal strategies to effect constitutional change, typically blurring the distinction between ordinary and constitutional politics. We discuss four versions of populist constitutional politics that seek to contest or “rebalance” the relation between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism in the democratic regimes populists inherit: the constitutional politics of populist

Introduction  23 movement parties before they enter power (in opposition); the combination of populist movements with populists in government pushing for constitutional change; constitutional replacement and/​or change through amendment and court packing when populists control and are “the government.” As we show in detail by looking at the relevant cases, none of these strategies resolve the tension between populism and constitutionalism although all of them undermine both constitutionalism and democracy. Indeed, it is an interesting question which method of constitutional politics serves the purposes of populist authoritarianism best: replacement, amendment, or court capture. Finally, c­ hapter 5 seriously considers “Alternatives to Populism.” Since we are interested in a forward-​looking democratic alternative rather than mere restoration, and insofar as we reject forms of revolutionary overthrow that themselves lead in authoritarian directions, we start by systematically distinguishing “popular” and “populist.” We do this by showing that popular sovereignty, chains of equivalence, leadership, political conflict, and even the constituent power can be given radically different democratic interpretations than what is relied on by populists. We also wish to rescue some, though certainly not all, host ideologies from populism, in particular socialism in the sense of social democracy and nationalism in the name of valorizing different levels of collective identity including patriotism. In search of a strategy, we return to the dualistic one proposed by our Civil Society and Political Theory. This means re-​establishing democratic relations of influence between the levels of civil and political society. The retrieval of the pluralist form of the movement level and the reconstruction of the political form of the party will be important steps in this effort. We maintain that the goals of a political alternative based on the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity can be the same irrespective of the given form of populist politics. But we also recognize that whether populism is a mobilized force of opposition, a strong party capable of winning elections, a dominant force “in” or of “the” government, or even a new regime, the dualistic strategies will have to vary accordingly. In the movement stage the emphasis would have to be not only on building a democratic movement but re-​establishing pluralistic relations with other forms of mobilization some of which may alas have populist elements. In the party stage (whether prior or posterior to grassroots mobilization) the choice will again emerge for democratic movements whether to form a political party or re-​ enforce an existing one. But in either case rebuilding the party on the ground is a sine qua non for strengthening democratic party politics. When populism is in government, but not yet the government, we argue that supports should be given to branches of power that remain independent within the separation or division of powers. The effort now however is primarily electoral. Even that becomes difficult when populism is “the” government and especially when it is a new regime. Fortunately, we will be able to argue that, as we have seen in the 1970s, 80s,

24  Populism and Civil Society and early 90s, even authoritarian regimes are vulnerable to dualistic strategies on both domestic and international levels. We end with a brief reminder of how post-​revolutionary radicalism has been and can be again successful especially given the predictable inability of populist governments and regimes to solve the problems that facilitated their rise to power.

1

Populism: Why and Why Now? It would be difficult to deny that populism has become a radical, widely present political challenge today, contesting and often attaining governmental power. There have been anticipations before in modern history, for example in the French Revolution,1 later agrarian movements in Russia, the United States in the late 19th century, and Eastern Europe. Also, the phenomenon has been present in Latin America throughout the 20th century. Thus the question “why” must be asked about modernity as such. But given the contemporary proliferation of populist politics, the question “why now” is equally interesting theoretically, and is for us politically more important. Fortunately, to begin to answer these two questions, we can rely on Gino Germani’s pioneering work, which, despite its faults and methodological biases, is analytically pathbreaking. Germani very usefully distinguishes between long, middle, and short-​term levels of causation and applies these to identify Argentine populism and to distinguish it from Italian Fascism, placing both within the genus of modern authoritarianism.2 For the common long-​term cause he identifies “the structural tension inherent in all modern society between growing secularization, and the necessity of maintaining a minimal prescriptive central nucleus sufficient for integration.” Accordingly, the middle-​term causality has to do with the stage of modernization of given contexts. Fascist “counter-​mobilization” is thus supposed to be a response against mobilized forces of already modern societies, whereas populism emerges during difficult modernization processes. Thus, in the short term, fascism is seen as “counter-​ mobilization” of middle and rural strata where “primary mobilization” (political inclusion in parties and unions) of industrial and working classes has already taken place. On the contrary, he understands populism as a form of primary mobilization where the effective inclusion and party representation of urban subalterns has not taken place, or has not succeeded. We cannot accept most of the substance of this sophisticated conception, tied not only to culturally oriented functionalism, a somewhat rigid modernization theory, as well as the dominant Argentine–​Italian comparison behind it all that applies primarily to older Latin American populisms.3 But we do want to use the three-​level model of explanation, focusing on what has been called the “demand side” primarily on the second level, and the “supply side” on the third.4

26  Populism and Civil Society As to the first level, the long term, we also do not wish to follow Germani in substituting a cultural reductionism for the neo-​Marxist economic one. Instead, we will postulate three fundamental levels of contradiction of modernity: cultural, economic, and political. Each plays a role for all modern challenges to democratic politics, but the primary significance of different contradictions is central for the three options of nationalism, state socialism, and populism.5 For the cultural contradiction we will follow Germani, but given the significance of many forms of authoritarianism in both secular and religious societies, we will substitute for secularization the destruction of traditional or conventional forms of life, identity, status, sources of meaning, and solidarity, as well as the difficulty for some groups to accept or embrace new post-​conventional norms and identities.6 We see this problem area as the source of fundamental cultural tensions and status anxieties.7 Ever since Max Weber’s famous essay on the topic, social theorists have understood that status hierarchies are important in every society. They entail inequalities in social honor, esteem, and prestige that attach to groups and vary independently. Nevertheless, they influence and are influenced by class positions and situations of political power.8 Status hierarchies are based on normative orders, typically generalized across a shared societal and cultural context. They are relatively durable, insofar as status groups tend to coalesce around a distinctive style of life, generating both status conventions and particular social identities and solidarities.9 Certainly, understanding the effects of social status differentials among social groups is crucial for comprehending some of the mechanisms behind intractable patterns of inequalities in a society.10 It is also the case that substantial cultural, structural, and institutional change can generate shifts in the sociocultural and normative frameworks that determine the sources of prestige, esteem, and social honor in a society.11 The long term “cultural contradiction” of modernity lies in the paradox that cultural shifts are endemic and typically involve the increasing sophistication, generalization, and reflexivity of cultural values that allow for the emergence of alternative normative status orders. The latter may be more universalistic, inclusive, and open to individual mobility than the former status order, thereby undermining rigid social hierarchies. But they also but also entail the decline in status of those tied to traditional ways of life and displaced normative orders. Shifts in cultural frameworks may overturn a society’s generalized normative status order such that the apparently stable social status formerly enjoyed by a social group is undermined.12 This generates a “fear of falling” that gets exacerbated especially when cultural and normative shifts enhance the social status and respect accorded to formerly denigrated groups.13 While it is not possible to regenerate the old sources of meaning, community, forms of life, and normative orders

Populism: Why and Why Now?  27 undermined by long-​term cultural (and other) trends, the risk of anomie, severe culture clashes, and deep societal polarization in the context of middle-​term crises of solidarity, as we will see, are especially high. Such long-​term change implies status losses for some groups, which in crisis context can lead to susceptibility to populist mobilization.14 For the economic contradiction we are still able to follow Marx, who understood the capitalist epoch to have generated enormous material wealth compared to all previous societies, but at the paradoxical cost of new forms of poverty, domination, inequality, and economic irrationality. Finally, on the political level, we see the key contradiction as that between the norms of democratic self-​government and the continued (or renewed) low levels of inclusion and participation in, and responsiveness of, political systems. It would seem obvious, that where nationalism as the search for “imagined community”15 could be seen as one important response to the cultural loss of shared meaning, solidarity, and status, socialism’s key target is and has always been the irrational organization of wealth and welfare. Nevertheless, nationalists can and have often targeted the nation’s loss of political autonomy and material wealth to the benefit of competitors. As the category of alienation has shown, socialists too are concerned with loss of solidarity and meaning. Moreover, their affinity to direct democracy indicates deep interest in the political contradiction of capitalist democracy. Nevertheless, just as nationalists consider the achievement or preservation or even extension of the nation state to be the key to not only community but wealth and autonomy as well, for socialists fundamental economic transformation has always remained primary. Here we can consider only the formally similar case of populism, and we will argue that in all its versions it is ultimately or primarily a response to the political contradiction of modern democracy, or more exactly representative government.16 This can be seen in various forms: the tension between principles of popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, the gap between formal democratic participation and genuine responsiveness and accountability of representatives, or the gap between formal incorporation in political systems of subaltern strata, and the absence of civil and social rights that could make their political rights viable and practicable.17 But we will also maintain that on the level of host ideologies, different populisms do and probably must respond (or pretend to respond) to some combination or selection of economic and cultural “deficits.” Moving on to the middle range level of causality, that we wish to understand less in terms of modernization and its possible stages and more in terms of a crisis theory applicable to societies on different levels of development. Here we will argue that first and foremost crisis potentials or long-​term deficits of

28  Populism and Civil Society representation and electoral and party systems have played especially important roles. We accept Germani’s thesis that a crisis of representation and therefore populism are possible where something has gone wrong with primary mobilization. But that failure can no longer be seen only as the absence of organization or atomization of “available masses.” Not only is populism possible for previously well-​organized urban industrial strata, but the thesis should be rejected also for both the very large informal sectors that have shown significant levels of organization and rational action and for rural organized or disorganized workers.18 Where there is a potential crisis or a long-​term deficit of representation, it is the organized rather than the atomized who believe themselves to be un-​or underrepresented, generally with reason. We do not wish to reduce the middle term only to its political dimension. There is no question that the economic shocks stressed by interpreters such as Dani Rodrik and cultural shifts depicted by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris play a significant role in exacerbating political crisis tendencies or deficits. In other words: democracy, welfare, and status/​meaning/​solidarity deficits interact.19 Radical socialist and fascist answers to these dilemmas are possible, but populism is the answer only where the political deficit of representation is very much salient. It is on the level of host ideologies that different populists will emphasize the welfare or status deficits, or their combinations, depending on the context with its specific structure of challenges and grievances. Finally in the short term, along with Germani but re-​interpreting the concept, we will not neglect political mobilization. It is this that turns crisis potential into full blown political crises. As the many analysts note pointing to “bait and switch”20 logics on the part of existing parties that “normalize” themselves during elections or in governmental power, re-​mobilization rather than primary or counter-​mobilization of the relevant strata becomes possible assuming new supplies of alternatives.21 Such a “supply” cannot be assumed to be always available. It will depend variously on grassroots expression of grievances, international transmission of ideas, available leaderships outside or even within parties, whether offered from above or constructed from below, the construction of plausible narratives combining democracy deficits with those of welfare and/​or status, and, increasingly, media strategies. Here again the relationship of economic and cultural changes and pathologies to political representation will be important. The possible relevance of a host ideology will in part depend on the salience of either economic or cultural factors within a crisis or long-​term deficit complex. But, we stress, the populist response to the combination of deficits is first and foremost political, focusing on identification with a leader or leadership.22

Populism: Why and Why Now?  29

The Long Term: The Fundamental Contradiction of Modern Democracy What else did even Sieyès do but simply put the sovereignty of the nation into the place which has been vacated by the sovereign king? —​Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963) p.156 Putting “the nation” or “the people” in the place of the sovereign monarch has been full of contradictions from the beginning. As Edmund Morgan has so convincingly shown,23 the physical body of the people, unlike the king’s, could not be easily found or even unambiguously identified. All that was available was the abstraction, a fiction he called it. Or as Claude Lefort put it even earlier, “at the moment when popular sovereignty is assumed to manifest itself, when the people is assumed to actualize itself by expressing its will, that social interdependence breaks down.”24 According to Lefort, in the modern concept of the people “[n]‌umber replaces substance” and what is left sociologically is a “pure diversity of individuals.”25 His point is that when compared to the people, as the organized third estate of the old regime, the people of universal suffrage become not only anonymous but also disorganized. One could derive the temptation for populism in the democratic age from this state of affairs alone, as Morgan as well as Francois Furet have been inclined to do so.26 Yet the problem goes even deeper. In its struggle against absolutism, modern democracy begins with two fundamental ideas rather than popular sovereignty alone. The second is constitutionalism, inherited from the medieval past.27 To an advocate like Thomas Paine, the two ideas are complementary and mutually necessary. Yet they are, and always have been, also in serious conflict.28 We believe the ultimate roots of populism are to be located in the fundamental tension between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism.29 Both constitutionalism and popular sovereignty were directed against the king’s sovereignty, but where one sought to limit and circumscribe that status, the other claimed to replace it. Two fundamental dilemmas followed. Sovereignty has been traditionally interpreted as the absence of legal limits, as being above and beyond at least human law. Yet, just at the moment the people were supposed to become sovereign they were to be deprived of exactly that sovereignty as it was previously defined (Bodin’s legibus solutus) by constitutional limitations. Starting with constitutionalism, as an idea of limitation of all legitimate power, the problem was analogous. Just at the moment government was supposed to become limited, a new legibus solutus was identified in “the people,” to be placed above and beyond the constitution. As the various experiments of the European revolutions have shown from the beginning through the 20th century, the two anti-​absolutist ideas could lead to very different politics: limited monarchy and

30  Populism and Civil Society systems of checks and balances on the one side and the glorification of insurrection and even democratic dictatorship on the other.30 Three additional ideas were supposed to come to the rescue: representation, the constituent power, and fundamental rights. The first was to diminish the absolutist danger inherent in popular sovereignty, the second addressed the elitist danger inherent within constitutionalism, while the third was to mediate between them since constitutionally guaranteed rights would make each citizen a part of the sovereign. All of these provisions were strongly advocated by participants in the democratic revolutions. Representation, originally medieval as Rousseau critically noted, was supposed to make the absent sovereign present without the dangers to constitutional government. It was not only that a room could hold representatives as against the people as a whole, or that representatives could be actually found, and identified or selected. More importantly, representation, whether medieval or modern, has always presupposed elections under constitutional regulation and limitation.31 Any legitimate process of choosing representatives presupposes rules that are materially, if not necessarily formally, constitutional. Since elections generally assume fixed terms, re-​election is itself a limitation for incumbents or at least their supporters. Even more importantly, though it has been sometimes claimed that elected representatives embodied the people and could do all that the people could do,32 the reality of their difference and separate corporate status was impossible to ignore especially when parliamentary and public opinion diverged. If “elective aristocracy” was the mediation between popular sovereignty and governmental authority, as Bernard Manin claims,33 it was a constitutionalist device by its nature even if not in some historical settings.34 Undoubtedly, representative government as a form of popular sovereignty is based on a fiction. Elective aristocracy however is very real, and seems to mean the triumph of constitutionalism over democracy. There have been two strategies to diminish the fiction and turn it into a counterfactual norm. The first and most obvious is democratization as a process.35 Representation, whether in England, France, or the United States begins with restrictions of the franchise. Its expansion, involving removal of property requirements, establishing women’s suffrage, reducing age limits, and giving voting rights to all regardless of race, religion, or origin were important steps. So was the introduction of elections for more offices, especially those of local and regional governments. Most important perhaps have been the institutionalization of fundamental rights. In other words, the modern constitution itself has always had the potential to diminish the contradiction between democratic norm and elected aristocracy. The fully developed forms of civil, political, and social rights36 establish the status equality of representatives and represented. Together the three forms of rights guarantee not only the formal but also the material possibility of participation. Even as the

Populism: Why and Why Now?  31 popular sovereign remains a deus absconditus, each citizen is supposed to be fully part of that hidden or fictional actor, in theory superior to the representative body. Most important in the rights complex are the provisions providing for participation outside of legislatures: public communication, association, and assembly.37 The focus of democratization on inclusion and rights converges with the second form of bringing the fiction closer to reality, what P. Rosanvallon called counter-​democracy. Accordingly, representative government can be made legitimate not only through “liberal” limits on the activity of representatives, but even more through the “democratic” exercise of monitoring, critique, and even resistance on the part of public opinion and civil associations.38 To be sure democratization and counter-​democracy can run into the limits of constitutions and the power of those given authority under them. In order for democratization of representation to work, constitutions must therefore be open to their own improvement. Paradoxically, this is not identical to having “flexible” constitutions as understood in the British tradition, surrendering overwhelming power to elected representatives, yielding parliamentary rather than popular sovereignty.39 But neither is a constitution rigidly closed off to change compatible with either the operation of counter-​democratic institutions or long-​term democratization. The revolutionary distinction between the constituent and the constituted powers suggests rigidity in normal and greater flexibility in extraordinary circumstances as long as the power to make and design constitutions is suitably differentiated from that of the regular representatives. Just as representation implies the interpretation of popular sovereignty through constitutionalism, the idea of the constituent power implies the penetration of constitutionalism by popular sovereignty. The tensions between constitutionalism and popular sovereignty do not disappear through their inter-​penetration, as indicated by questions concerning the possible limitations of even the constituent power. All we can say is that they can be managed to make sure that the norm of popular sovereignty is not reduced to a mere fiction.40 In other words, political processes linked to the operation of civil society–​based counter-​democracy are essential in preserving the difference between counterfactual norm and fiction. Two kinds of processes are involved, one defensive or liberal and the other pro-​active and radically democratic. The first involves constitutionalist resistance (i.e., defense of a democratic constitution) against attempts at usurpation by political powers, elected or even unelected. The second is more important. It potentially involves projects of democratization and even constitutional change. Both respond to potential crises or deficits of representation, the first to usurpation and the second to constitutional rigidification. But when they fail, there is another category of response: populism.41

32  Populism and Civil Society

The Middle Term: Deficits of Representation Crises of representation in several distinct forms, each expressed on the level of party systems, have been proposed as causes of populist challenge and at times success.42 We agree but with several reservations.43 First, we restrict the mode of explanation to the middle term. As already argued, the long-​term foundation for populist challenge lies in the inherent tension between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, as it is reproduced within each dimension, between representative and participatory democracy, between constituted and constituent powers, and between formal rights and their genuine realization in the form of social autonomy. Certainly, constitutional democracy is not always in political crisis. Crises can be avoided by democratization that can take the form of constituent processes under constitutional safeguards. But, as de La Torre argues, we should see populism as a living temptation in the age of democracy, and not only in Latin America.44 While exacerbated in extraordinary moments called crises, populism is also present under normal political circumstances, responding to long-​ term contradictions. Accordingly, it is better in the middle term to speak about structural deficits and leave the idea of crisis in the fully developed sense to the short term. Second, while we do believe that the context for populist challenge is first and foremost political, we do not think that serious crisis potentials emerge because of political, i.e., democracy, deficits alone. Either the economy (welfare deficit) or culture (status losses, resulting in solidarity and meaning deficits) or their combination can be the source of grievances for the potential political crisis tendency to become sufficiently serious or salient to motivate people to rally to the populist cause. The availability of ideologies plays an important role in thematizing economic and cultural grievances, and these can become “hosts” for populist challenges. Thus, it is at least plausible to argue that significant cultural change, such as from material to post-​material value systems, enable challenges to inequalities and discrimination tied to group identities or characteristics (e.g., race, gender, religion, ethnicity), when they conflict with the general principles of justice, merit, and opportunity that undergird modern societies self-​ understanding. But such challenges, when taken up by movements and endorsed by establishment elites, can trigger a “cultural backlash” amongst those groups who experience or fear relative status loss in shifting cultural and normative contexts.45 Indeed this is especially likely when cultural shifts occur in the context of decline in the traditional material sources of self-​respect and group based political influence.46 For the current context in the United States for example, several authors pinpoint the shifts in cultural frameworks that can generate new normative and

Populism: Why and Why Now?  33 ideological orders, diminishing the social status formerly enjoyed by the non–​ college educated white male working class.47 The growth of the knowledge economy valorizes the college degree and highly skilled, adaptable (especially tech) workers, with the best jobs in large urban or suburban centers while the old industrial heartlands and rural areas decline thanks to deindustrialization and technological change. This goes hand in hand with the emergence of cultural and normative/​ideological frameworks that valorize urban lifestyles, celebrate diversity, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, endorse political secularism, and reject social hierarchies built on racial, gender, and sexual orientation hierarchies.48 Hence the experience of an “honor squeeze”—​the evisceration of the social bases of self-​respect and prestige—​by rural and rustbelt male, traditional, non–​college educated, religious, primarily white, working-​class populations.49 Indeed, traditional, white, male working-​class groups now have relatively low economic, social, and cultural capital all over the industrialized world. While they share the deficit with racial minorities and immigrants, the bulk of whom are also working class, the social and cultural capital of the latter is rising or emerging.50 For them other factors, like race, religion, nationality, and gender, can be invoked not only to shape and direct their intense feelings of social deprivation but also to specify conditions for group membership. Not only economic hardship, but the salience of efforts to promote gender and racial equality and non-​discrimination against minority groups and some religions (e.g., Muslims) through social movements and public policy, drawing on “postindustrial values,” is what undergirds the perception that white men and Christians are more discriminated against than the latter.51 The cultural shifts are “progressive” in that they tend to diminish unjust deficits in social status and opportunity for previously excluded and denigrated segments of the population. But they also can be seen as unfair, depending on how they are framed and taken up by movements and sympathetic elites, insofar as they can be made to appear to further undermine the relative social status of those whose forms of life, traditional values, and occupations are increasingly marginalized and with whom urban, cultural, and political elites (the “establishment”) exhibit little solidarity. The resultant sense of a “culture crisis” is the entry point for populist status-​based identity politics that systematically conflates two types of loss of status: the one resulting from the rise of previously undervalued identities and the other caused by decline of previously valued forms of life.52 Nevertheless, given the pervasiveness of the phenomenon in very different cultural contexts, it makes sense to follow Dani Rodrik empirically and stress in the middle term the causal role of economic shocks, with the resulting inequality and insecurity, whether of the consequences of the import substitution industrialization (ISI) or the current version of globalization.53 Indeed economic shocks and technological and political-​economic shifts causing precariousness

34  Populism and Civil Society and insecurity can intersect with cultural shifts leading to the loss of status for those associated with declining economic and regional sectors. Analyses of “the precariat” and of precarization of once secure working-​class strata link economic and status insecurity together in advanced economies of the North and the West as well as in the global South.54 That said, it also remains important to differentiate populism as a political phenomenon from economic shocks and particular choices of policy whether ISI, neo-​liberal “reform,” or neo-​socialism, even as these play a role in strengthening versions of the populist challenge, contributing to its (generally temporary) success and its policies.55 Third, political crisis related phenomena should not be restricted to the party systems as important as they are. Other dimensions of the constitution as it is actually practiced may play important roles. Here we will pay particular attention to the workings of the executive branch and the pattern that has been called “delegative democracy”56 that we believe has provided both a cause and, paradoxically, the main governing option for populists, thereby exacerbating the phenomenon and opening the door to later renewals of alternative populist claims. Fourth, and finally, populist rhetoric and mobilization not only depend on crises, but also help to produce them.57 In this sense “the supply” can contribute to the emergence of “the demand.” While adopting a purely voluntaristic or constructivist interpretation of crisis phenomena would be a mistake, it is without doubt that the discourse of populists aims to turn deficits of representation, solidarity, and welfare into radical disruption of existing patterns of competition and policy formation. The presence of a populist party, relying on the language of friend and enemy, radicalizes already existing perceptions of mal-​representation of different population strata by what is called the establishment or the oligarchy. Political polarization is the common result, incapacitating the ability of elected governments to act. This last argument however is better handled when dealing with the short rather than the middle term. With these reservations, when speaking of serious political deficits of representation, it makes sense to focus first and foremost on party systems, which are supposed to mediate between represented and representatives, and more generally civil society and state organs.58 According to Kenneth Roberts, on the bases of Latin American experience, three types of party systems are particularly prone historically to crises of representation.59 The first are exclusionary systems, with oligarchic parties facing the shock of the formal establishment of universal suffrage and political rights of citizenship. The newly included cannot identify with the old parties held responsible for their exclusion and tend to generate new movements and parties to represent their interests. Germani too has focused on this type of “participation crisis” and identified two waves: liberal populism dominated by middle class elements and national populism responding to the grievances of urban, working-​class strata.60 Roberts refers to this process as the

Populism: Why and Why Now?  35 “initial political incorporation [that] happens only once.”61 When, however, initial incorporation leads only to inchoate, poorly institutionalized representation, personalized forms of support replace party identification with the result he calls “serial populisms.” It is here that de La Torre’s argument about populism being an ever-​present option for normal as well as extraordinary politics is especially relevant.62 Finally, Roberts postulates a third context, when initial incorporation leads to very strong parties, that monopolize elections as well as governmental powers, and exclude other alternatives in favor of collusion among themselves. This is the cartel party phenomenon,63 called partocracy (partidocracia or partyarchy) in Latin America, leading to the crises of “second incorporation” in that region, opening the door to populists. It is not only a matter of new population groups, the precariat of the informal economy, being still excluded from citizenship rights. De La Torre clarifies why it is right here to once again speak of incorporation. According to him incorporation has been a permanent rather than merely initial problem in Latin America because of the weakness of civil and social citizenship rights. Thus incorporation in terms of political rights has remained deficient in the context of radical civil and social insecurity.64 This conception however points beyond crises that are merely political. Roberts is fully aware that in none of his three contexts does the crisis of representation occur merely because of the character of the party systems. As Germani already argued, the shift from liberal to national populism in a country like Argentina occurred as different class actors (or multi-​class coalitions) dominated the scene and demands shifted from political rights to socioeconomic ones. In this sense, national populism can be seen as a substitute for its more or less contemporary, namely social democracy, but at lower levels of industrialization, where strong working class consciousness and identity did not yet develop. Thus we have a right to consider this version of populism exemplified by Peron, Vargas, Cardenas, and initially APRA in Peru to have relied on social democracy, or more exactly economic populism65 as its host ideology. But populism, being a political phenomenon, was not as it turned out reducible to the economic policies long associated with many of its first variants, or dependence on a single host ideology.66 With the “debt-​fueled” crisis of import substitution models of industrialization, that in the end hurt above all the intended beneficiaries of welfare policies,67 populism was able to produce right-​wing versions adopting to neo-​liberal policies of adjustment in almost all countries. The policy could rely, at least initially, on the underrepresented but huge sector of the informal economy, favorable to market orientation rather than the state intervention irrelevant to this form of activity.68 Given the strength of traditional populism, and the negative consequences of neo-​liberal policies for important constituencies, the result could be serial populisms under competing leaders with alternating economic policies (Ecuador69) or oscillation within a

36  Populism and Civil Society political organization (Argentina) or even a combination of both these possibilities (Peru). All of the alternatives, statist or market oriented, could rely on popular bases, whether traditional workers or the precariat of the informal sector, whether mestizo or indigenous constituencies. Finally, for the third type of case, for the populisms of the “second incorporation,” Roberts himself strongly insists on the social-​economic context, the erosion of social citizenship rights under neo-​liberal reform.70 Where the main parties within cartel arrangements were linked to structural adjustment policies, and especially where populists could be accused of bait and switch strategies of abandoning economic populist promises when in government, there was in many Latin American countries a return to left-​wing host ideologies. The “left turn” was made possible not only by popular mobilization against neo-​populism but by the raw material export price boom71 that in several countries allowed for the return of redistribution, if temporarily as it turned out. Interestingly, bait and switch type strategies in Central Europe, carried out by former Communist parties who adopted the neo-​liberal perspective and engaged in a race to the bottom in taxation, deregulation, and anti-​union policies, led to the emergence of right-​wing populism eclectically combining protectionist and neo-​liberal policies.72 To sum up then, deficits of representation, whether by the absence of a representative party (version 1), the weakness of a plurality of personalist parties claiming to represent (version 2), or the strength of colluding parties blocking responsiveness and avoiding accountability (version 3) can each serve as the foundation of an ever-​renewed and seemingly permanent temptation of populism and the emergence of leaders or actors inclined to use a populist rhetoric.73 The deficits can become crisis potentials, conducive to powerful mobilization, when and only when substantive grievances of significant (usually subaltern) population strata become salient and are seen as systematically neglected by the representative system. Such a grievance could be based on the dramatic neglect of social, welfare, and civil rights in the context achievement of formal political rights, on pauperization as a consequence of the eventual failure of import substitution models, and on the retrenchment of social rights leading to demands for a “second incorporation.” Each of these crisis tendencies is associated with one of the three waves of populism in Latin America: economic populist, neo-​ populist, and neo-​socialist populism. In each case the party systems and economic deficits interact, the strains of the latter leading to crises of the former opening the possibility for social mobilization, bottom up or top down. The latter always targets the party system as well as previous economic policies, but generally promises more than just electoral victory of a new party along with change of policies. In almost all cases the political system as a whole is linked to failed representation, and its re-​foundation is almost always a part of the populist promise and program.

Populism: Why and Why Now?  37 To be sure, this analysis is restricted to a few Latin American countries. As we will see in c­ hapter 2, cartel parties and bait and switch strategies could lead, in Europe, to right-​wing populism and in some countries to combinations on the left and right. But also for Latin America, the conceptualization is too narrow, even on the political level. Our clue is the common promise of constitutional re-​foundation in all the countries where economic or neo-​socialist populism has made a return.74 Such a promise may be consistent with attacks on “oligarchic” establishments that arguably cannot be replaced without changing the rules of the game, but gain their plausibility and appeal from very real deficits of the versions of constitutionalism in place. But what exactly is wrong with the existing constitutional systems beyond the electoral structure that produces in some cases weak or and in others oligarchic parties? First proposed by Guillermo O’Donnell75 the concept of delegative democracy provides the main clue, not only as to why populists charge the system as deficient but also why their own solutions will not democratize it. We believe the concept is built on the critique of presidentialism by Juan Linz and his collaborators, but with three advantages. First, it is also applicable to parliamentary versions of plebiscitary democracy, an important gain for the study of populism that we now see present under both major political forms: presidentialism and parliamentarism. Second, it focuses on the form of democracy that helps to justify the populist critique of existing systems as unaccountable and unresponsive. Third, it indicates the model of representation that populists themselves will promote when in government and even constitutionally enact if possible, whatever their claims with respect to their interest in direct democracy. According to Linz’s thesis, presidentialism is perilous both because of its weakness and strength.76 The weakness is constitutional due to the defining feature of the formal separation of powers. Especially when producing divided government based on different parties controlling the main branches, separation can lead to the incapacity of either the executive or the legislature to act, and in particular to respond to crises. The strength is on the level of personal electoral legitimacy produced by the direct national election of the head of the executive, when contrasted with either the sectional-​territorial or party political choice of members of the legislature. When confronted with divided government, stalemate, and various crises that cannot be vigorously addressed, the superior legitimacy of the executive likely bolstered by emergency provisions, self-​coups, mobilization from above, etc. can motivate and allow presidents to override or even violate constitutional checks on executive authority. In O’Donnell’s analysis, delegative democracy builds on the side of strength, but he generalizes the critique beyond even presidential government. It is defined by the claim that a president or a prime minister with “sufficient” electoral majority is “entitled to govern as he or she sees fit” for the duration of

38  Populism and Civil Society constitutionally defined authorization.77 The chief executive is “vertically accountable” to the electorate at the required time, but is not “horizontally accountable” to other branches, the media, or civil society. O’Donnell unfortunately seems to accept the populist argument that the explicit “majoritarianism” of the delegative model is more democratic, if less liberal, than representative democracy with well-​developed institutional mediations and limitations. His description too seems to be focused on a populist version, especially the claim that the chief executive embodies the nation and its interests that requires no tests, or at most the test of acclamation by a movement as its political base. Nevertheless, technocratic forms of justification based on knowledge and expertise have also been possible, as he at times suggests, speaking of “curious blend of organicistic and technocratic conceptions.”78 All versions of delegative democracy, but especially the technocratic one, allow the differentiation of the promises of the electoral campaign on the policymaking level, and the violation of the former by the latter. Delegative democracy thus is often linked to the bait and switch tactics that we will analyze later, dealing with the short term of political mobilization in populist forms. Finally, according to O’Donnell, delegative democracy “whether due to culture, tradition or . . . learning” has long-​term origins where it exists.79 Cycles between outright authoritarian regimes and democratic restorations lead to the underdevelopment of democratic and representative institutions. According to de La Torre’s slightly different analysis, it is the underdevelopment of citizen rights during political incorporation of “the common people into the political community,” that is ultimately responsible. While some Latin American countries like Chile and Uruguay according to O’Donnell seem to be outside this “tradition,” post-​Communist as well as many African and Asian countries are said to share it. Most importantly for us, historically, populist governments have maintained and built upon this “tradition.” Nevertheless, populist movements, either anti-​ technocratic or based on alternative versions of populism, are also well positioned to exploit the deficiencies and pathologies of delegative democracy, especially in periods of crisis, when the negative consequences of its short-​term policies become generally evident. They can denounce its failure of representation, responsiveness, and accountability in periods between elections. They can attack the violation of economic campaign promises. They can demand a constitutional re-​foundation that will institute ongoing direct democratic controls over the executive. They can even exploit and rely on constitutional checks and balances, as long as they are out of power. Thus the failure of delegative democracy, along with the unrepresentative nature of different party systems, can be the reason behind calls for constitution making in legal or plebiscitary forms. But as one episode described by de La Torre graphically demonstrates—​the

Populism: Why and Why Now?  39 constitutional conflicts in Ecuador around the populist leadership of Velasco Ibarra80—​ when a democratic and liberal constitution emerges from such efforts, the leader does his best to replace the result (the constitution of 1945) by one more suitable for the purposes of delegative democracy. As we will see in ­chapter 4, even when direct democratic (Venezuela and Bolivia) or liberal elements (Colombia, Hungary) do find their way into democratic constitutions, populist leaders try to use the amending, plebiscitary, and even constitutional review processes to re-​enforce the power of the executive over the other branches in line with the goal of a purely majoritarian delegative democracy.

The Short Term: Bait and Switch, Populist Supply, and Media Strategies Following Germani we spoke of long, middle, and short-​term causation of the populist challenge. But what is the relationship between these different forms of conflict and temporality? Certainly some kind of sequence is implied by the very structure of argumentation. If the long-​term contradiction within political democracy is always there, it must also be earlier. If different crisis tendencies are manifested in cycles, then they or at least some of them, emerge later in time. The problem is more difficult for the relation of the middle to the short range. We have already conceded to Benjamin Moffitt that the crisis discourse of actors contributes to crises. This would mean the reversal of causation between middle and short term. Yet it should be possible and even helpful, as in Marxian discussions of crisis, to distinguish between crisis tendencies or structural problems and actual crises that genuinely threaten the survival of a system, subsystem, or at the very least the fundamental rules according to which they normally operate. In this theory tradition, that is still the best we have, consciousness and motivations of actors play a role in the temporal transition from crisis tendencies to full blown crises.81 Admittedly, it is not likely that crisis consciousness or crisis discourse alone produce actual crises, from nothing. An economic crisis tendency involving dysfunction and disequilibria can thus be considered temporally prior to legitimation and motivation crises in which the consciousness of actors play a major role.82 Yet, it is the latter, “conjunctural disturbances” compounding the tendencies toward crises that are a crucial part of providing the “opportunity structure,” opening the “political space” for populist alternatives.83 What are the phenomena that convert middle-​term crisis tendencies to short-​ term crises and conflicts around a populist challenge? The literature suggests two relevant categories of focus: the formally economistic categories of populist “demand” and “supply”84 and the more usual interpretive sociological concept of

40  Populism and Civil Society mobilization.85 Of course, society or even politics should not be reduced to a kind of market. Yet, as we will show, there are contexts in which the concepts of supply and demand can be very helpful, notably in areas of politics like elections and media communications where “colonization” by market-​like phenomena can be very plausibly maintained.86 Nevertheless, one key problem of supply-​demand explanations is almost unavoidable, namely that it is at times difficult if not impossible to distinguish in populist politics between demand and supply.87 We may find examples where charismatic leadership can lead to a populist challenge where there seemed to have been none before. In such a case, rare but not impossible, the supply is clearly prior, creating the demand. Or less voluntaristically, and more right for many cases, we can postulate populist leaders who, while responding to preexisting grievances, thus “demand,” constitute nevertheless a “supply” of charisma and narratives without which populist protest and organization cannot be effected or consummated. Yet, along with some interpreters we can point to the social construction of leaders, or at least the discourses that they repeat and productively utilize.88 In this last version the demand constitutes the supply, or arguably is itself a supply, thus relativizing the distinction itself. Even the important suggestion of Rovira Kaltwasser89 to consider demand to deal with the level of “structure” and put supply on that of “agency” does not fully solve the problem. Popular grievances can be considered either demands for organized actors to process and take into account or as motivations for the spontaneous action of those below who themselves have “agency.” With these reservations, the market analogous supply-​demand model has produced significant results for analyzing the short-​term challenge and success of populism, unsurprisingly in the domain of the emergence of populist parties.90 In competitive systems, parties and their leaderships have been often and plausibly depicted as entrepreneurs offering a suitably packaged and advertised supply of political products (candidates, programs) to consumers who express their demand through the vote and public opinion surveys. Assuming perfect competition, parties succeed if they respond well to voter demand. Accordingly, in the case of monopolies and cartels, political entrepreneurs try to structure and limit the role of demand. Several interpreters91 rely on this model of political competition when they point to bait and switch and “third road” strategies. The foundation for their arguments is the cartel party phenomenon (this is covered in more detail in c­ hapter 2). As argued already, for us, cartel party refers to the middle range of causation, indicating crisis tendency or potential of a model of representation. Yet populism does not emerge as a significant challenge and a political winner everywhere where oligarchic parties have colluded to eliminate the possibility of competition and genuine representation. The cartel can indeed be seen as a market strategy, but it does not on its own produce either

Populism: Why and Why Now?  41 a full-​fledged representation crisis or populism. Here is where bait and switch strategies come in. Germani has already noted that classical (or economic) populism finds a fertile ground where left-​wing parties of interest representation and mobilization have not emerged for historical reasons, whether economic or cultural.92 From the political market perspective, existing oligarchic parties would not and could not according to him respond to the political demand (needs, grievances, aspirations) of newly enfranchised and urbanized strata, that could be brought into politics only through new parties. Since working class consciousness and culture were underdeveloped in the case of the new, mostly class heterogenous (“multi-​class”) entrants, the opportunity for organizations and leaders was there, we should add as long as capable of providing the requisite discourse (e.g., Laclau’s “chain of equivalence”). Given such background for classical populism, it becomes an obvious question of why populist strategies remain or become plausible, given the existence of socialist, social democratic, and economic populist parties in many or even most later settings. One answer has to do with the emergence of very large new strata, the informal, illegal, or semi-​legal sector that in many countries has come to represent half or even more of the employed.93 These strata, now often called the “precariat,” consist of small market actors, who because of their illegality or semi-​ legality could not count on state interventionism, or for that matter on union organizations.94 In Latin America the source for these “strata” can be displaced rural workers, previously engaged in agriculture, while in Europe and the United States they originate from previously organized industrial workers displaced because of a combination of postindustrial development and global competition. In either case, the precariat does not possess forms of powerful labor organization capable of representing their interests, with a strong bargaining position, vis-​à-​vis not only the employers but the state and the main parties as well. Thus, they can be receptive to a market-​based host ideology, namely neo-​liberalism, replacing state-​centered economic populism. Dependent on the patronage of powerful individuals for their protection, on clientelism, they can also be open to new populist appeals made by leaders who resembled their patrons, promising to better their lives in particular, rather than in the enactment of more universal policies and protections.95 This is the version of neo-​populism, but it does not explain the yet newer neo-​socialist or neo-​classical populism that emerged in some countries with the famous (or supposed) left turn of several Latin American politics.96 This is where bait and switch strategies have played an important role in the neo-​liberal period.97 These contributed significantly to turning legitimation problems linked to the erosion of social rights gained in classical populism (and in Europe, social democracy) into crises of representation.98 Bait and switch

42  Populism and Civil Society indicates the actions of parties with left-​wing traditions (social democratic or economic populist) joining cartel arrangements linked to domestically consensual and/​or internationally imposed neo-​liberal policies. In particular, the phrase refers to a party or its leader campaigning on traditional left grounds, followed by actual policies structured by ideas of structural adjustment and austerity. The victory in Peru of Alberto Fujimori, a virtuoso of delegative democracy, is a clear example of just such a “switch.”99 More generally understood however, the contradiction could also be represented as between a party’s long-​term profile linked to redistribution and state interventionism and its turn to neo-​liberalism, whether already in elections, or, more plausibly, when in government. This was the case of the Peronism of Carlos Menem and the populism of the Mexican PRI in Latin America, as well as former Communist parties in Central Europe. In some instances, stable left-​wing parties in Western Europe, like the French socialists, German social democrats, and Italian ex-​communists, also accepted policies based on the neo-​liberal Washington Consensus. But the most powerful capitalist countries of the Anglo-​American world were also part of this phenomenon. The “new democracy” of Clinton and Blair too, as followed by several social democratic parties, have been rightly depicted in these terms. Paradoxically, new democracy became an influential label even in countries with the best established welfare states, in particular Scandinavia,100 where workers who were going to turn to the right were attached, and remained so, to ideals of state intervention, redistribution, and regulation. All these quite different cases of bait and switch can be represented as the loss of supply for a demand that was still alive and salient in the population, thus opening the “market niche” for new parties representing the older economic populism, traditional social democracy, or their combination. Unfortunately, however, what goes under the name of neo-​liberalism, but is better understood under the category of “hyper-​globalization,”101 involved economic and political constraints that made simple return to traditional social democracy and even the older forms of economic populism very difficult. The policies of these have been understood as based on compensations to the losers of trade-​openness, based on redistributing the very real benefits of that trade. Given hyper or financial globalization and the resulting race to the bottom regarding taxation and regulation, policies of compensation have become economically and politically more difficult. This was the case even under the best developed welfare states, but more so in the United States and especially Latin America, where institutions of redistribution have been historically much less developed.102 Three approaches were thus possible for originally left or classical populist parties and political entrepreneurs. The most common one was to moderate their neo-​liberal profile by adding some elements of redistribution and regulation to their market-​oriented policies. According to Roberts103 on whom we here

Populism: Why and Why Now?  43 rely, it was where military bureaucratic authoritarian regimes instituted the radical version of structural adjustment and austerity, above all in Chile, Brazil, and Uruguay, where non-​populist left alternatives moderating but not fully reversing market orientation became possible. The policies of many European Social Democrats, but also the left centrism of Obama, and Robert’s own exception of Argentina, following previous bait and switch actions by leaders of the same parties, speak against an overly deterministic conception here. In any case, not being able to renew traditional redistributive policies, the moderate approach kept the door open for populists on the left (and obviously on the right as well). The most dramatic response was by left populists in the Andean republics, relying on a commodity export boom that allowed the rise of neo-​socialist populism, which was in part a return to classical economic populism, but made more attractive by real or illusory and generally temporary concessions to radical or participatory democracy. Their success however was dependent on the high prices of oil, natural gas, and other raw materials, and therefore, as some rightly predicted, the short term.104 The third possibility, perhaps the most important one in Europe and the United States, was to shift the axis of competition in the market of parties from the economy to culture, or from goods (“positional competition”) to values (“valence competition”),105 addressing grievances that on their face had little to do with material welfare deficits, namely the cultural or status deficit. In the resulting two axis model106 of political competition, there was not only room for both left and right populisms, but a variety of party combinations claiming to be beyond the polarity of left and right. Such a mixed formula has been key to the success of the FN (Front National) (now the Rassemblement Nationale) in France, able to attract workers among its voters by its defense of a nationally and even ethnically reoriented welfare state.107 But, as it has been shown for Norway and Denmark by Magnus Marsdal,108 even libertarian or neo-​ liberal populist parties could attain a very large number of votes in traditionally social democratic countries from the very constituency that used to support the democratic left. Here is where change of the axes of competition comes in. The populist party gets its vote not by engaging in “positional competition,” in the language used by Roberts, around economic interests, but “valence competition” concerning the choice of fundamental values.109 How is such a shift of axes possible and plausible? Roberts proposes the idea of a broad transition from industrial to postindustrial society implying also the shift from material to post-​material values. The emergence of Green and radically liberal, multiculturally oriented parties on the left is a sign of the shift, which however enables populist parties and leaders on the right to claim and defend threatened, traditional, communitarian values. But why would voters previously attracted by economic interest representation vote for either of

44  Populism and Civil Society these cultural projects, especially the right-​wing one? One answer is quantitative: there are fewer people in the earlier class position. Thus at issue are shifts not by “workers” but former workers. Accordingly, the same postindustrial development dramatically reduces the size of the industrial working class, especially its union organized part on which the traditional left depended. But this does not account for shifts of vote within the significant remaining part of the working class, including union members. The second explanation is again based on the cartel phenomenon, or neo-​ liberal convergence, or the emergence of “the third way” among social democratic and left liberal parties. Here the stress, insisted on by Marsdal,110 is not on finding a new old space on the same “positional” or “economic” competition, as in the case of Latin American neo-​socialist populism, but shifting from one spatial axis to the other. In this argument, the change of preferences is not so much a function of the logic of general societal or cultural transformation, but of previously present, but subordinated, cultural grievances (“demand”), to which the ideological constructs of the populist parties provide “the supply.” According to the political market thesis, what is crucial is the choice of social democrats for a socioeconomic third way, involving great concessions to neo-​liberalism. What the argument assumes, on empirical grounds, is that the relevant strata are culturally conservative, and unfriendly to both post-​material or multicultural demands, the latter involving openness to immigrants and their cultures. Accordingly, the same constituencies would have remained open and committed to unions and parties had they made redistributive and welfare oriented arguments and proposals. For these working-​class voters who are potentially nationalist, the socioeconomic axis of competition was neutralized, taken out of commission, allowing workers and even many union members to vote their values even if against their economic interests. We should take this analysis to heart, as it even applies to the United States, if not to the Tea Party with its lower-​middle-​class base, then to the Trump electorate with its significant share of industrial workers. Behind disenchanted workers voting for the right in Anton Pelinka’s analysis of Austria, with implications well beyond, is the simultaneous decline of influence (based on relative numbers) and status (due to the multicultural politics of the left) of workers supporting the left.111 Thus the former parties of workers and unions become more and more linked to educated white, professional, women, and also diverse strata,112 further compromising their working-​class supporters who articulate their cultural anger by voting for the right. Thus, the market-​oriented analysis points to two types of cases of populist appeal: the opening of space on the original economic or positional axis of competition and the neutralization of that axis in favor of the valence or cultural conflicts. It should however be said that, in both types of cases, populists must

Populism: Why and Why Now?  45 offer narratives113 that are attractive and plausible in order to fill the newly available political space. For this reason they could not simply present themselves as mere repetition of either the older economic populism on the left nor of fascist politics on the right. How they manage to do this has many dimensions, and only some can be represented as supply within the market-​oriented approach. On the left superficially the problems appeared easier to solve, since Communist parties, if they survived the storm of 1989, could simply divest themselves of interventionist and redistributive positions similar to economic populism, thereby abandoning the construction of a populist profile except at times at electoral moments. These initially successful efforts, along with a few economic populist parties like the PRI, the Peronist Justicialists, and the Peruvian APRA under Alan Garcia, belong to the history of the already depicted bait and switch. Electoral victories were won at the cost of opening the door to new populisms. As for new populist formations, these relied on autonomous or semi-​ autonomous popular mobilizations, incorporating their ideals, organizational forms, and political practices that escape the boundaries of the market-​based paradigm. Whether in the Andean republics, or the two European countries where left populism became an important factor, Spain and Greece, the denunciation of the existing political systems as oligarchic or partocratic led new populist parties to incorporate direct democratic forms in their plans for reconstruction for both strategic and justificatory reasons. In Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, where left populist parties came to power, this stress led to frequent use of referenda, as well as constitutions formally incorporating participatory and multicultural elements. This too was a feature of the modernization of classical or economic populism. The problem of constructing politically plausible populist actors was far greater on the right. Many of the eventually electorally successful right or nationalist populist parties started out as neo-​fascist formations, fortunately but understandably with limited popular appeal. Whether in Germany, Austria, Italy, or even in the United Kingdom and France, this implied the need to shift from (neo)fascism to populism with its anti-​establishment, anti-​political appeal that was now represented as democratic, along with the acceptance and utilization of competitive elections. In countries such as the United Kingdom, and France too, the denunciation of existing regimes as undemocratic led to a stress on direct and plebiscitary democracy,114 promoting some famous referenda like the vote on Brexit, even if not yet to constitutional renovation. Exactly such political self-​reinvention was facilitated by changes in leadership from the old to the modern right, as from Haider to Strache in Austria and from Jean Marie Le Pen to Marine Le Pen in France.115 As described by all the analysts, the shift was never complete, and some relationship to the old authoritarian ideology, generally along with anti-​Semitism, survived in order to appeal to original

46  Populism and Civil Society core constituencies. A dualistic or pluralistic media strategy was in all the cases helpful to mask the inconsistency, along with a coded, concealed, or esoteric reference to the old themes. New enemies were chosen, first immigrants and then, given the productive relationships among European parties of the same background, Islamophobia. Even the reinvention could not, however, happen without significant outside support and recognition, whether by other parties or by organized movements. The party oriented market analogous paradigm can still explain how the normalization of the old system’s hostile parties was helped by the actions of their antagonists, whether including them in coalitions as in Austria, appropriating their themes and phobias for selfish, marketing reasons as by Sarkozy in France, or both as in the Netherlands.116 A special case of coming to government through mutual recognition was the triple populism of Italy117 (Berlusconi, Salvini, and Grillo) followed by the double populism of the Lega and 5 Star. As Balbo and Ruzza show, the cooperation of different parties with alternative concepts of il popolo based on different constituencies has proven (twice) unstable, in spite of agreements concerning the common enemy whether Communists, Islam, or the EU technocracy. When one of the two parties is very much organized and maintained as movement, with little more than populism as its thin ideology, as in the case of the 5 Star in coalition with the Lega, the tensions could have been, but in fact were not, more manageable.

The Turn to Mobilization The support of and interaction with civil society–​based mobilization turned out to be one of the means by which formerly authoritarian parties were normalized as populist political actors, who thereby became more politically acceptable as well as stable. Given the failure and replacement of mass society explanations (“available, irrational, atomized masses”118) in general for movements, and for populism in particular, we do well to treat the participants in large-​scale movements as already organized in groups, associations, and networks of various kinds. It is on this level that we can speak of civil society mobilization, a concept that falls outside market strategic explanatory models.119 Fortunately, the sociological approach seeks to answer precisely the questions of the origin, functions, and tensions of civil society supports for populist actors, by moving from the party-​political to the societal level where social movements are the primary collective actors and where even mobilization generating or complementing the activity of parties takes place.120 There is admittedly a link between market oriented, party centered explanations and those focused on social movements whose locus is civil society,

Populism: Why and Why Now?  47 namely the active role of parties and governments concerned with elections and re-​election in mobilization “from above.” But it is only obsolete mass society type theories that would allow portraying relationship as one between active sellers and advertisers and passive, manipulated, atomized consumers. What all modern social movement theories have done, whether following Touraine as identity oriented or adopting the strategic conceptions of Tilly and the resource oriented perspective, is restore the agency and subjectivity of societal actors.121 Thus the relationship between political and social actors is interactive in all convincing theories of mobilization. Yet the issue that we have depicted as the difficulty of distinguishing between demand and supply does not disappear with the sociological concept of mobilization used for analyzing the causality of populist in the short term. While there is always interaction, mutual recognition, and even mutual constitution, empirically the contrast between the dominant role of parties and that of societal self-​organization cannot be eliminated. While it may be misleading, on empirical grounds, interpreters do distinguish between mobilization from above and mobilization from below, or, more precisely plebiscitary versus participatory linkages between parties and movements. Before considering the issue of mobilization and its types in ­chapter 2, we need to note that the rational choice–​based analysis of the problem of supply is incomplete without even turning to the sociological level. The real or supposed harm caused by bait and switch strategies needs to be made conscious, as does the claim that there are alternatives addressing the lack of supply created by popular needs and demands. But we also need to consider the role of populist mobilization of status-​based identity politics (supply) in turning middle-​term crisis tendencies into outright cultural crises by fomenting deep antagonisms between competing status groups—​i.e., between the “authentic people” and the rest. As indicated earlier, when the sources of social honor and social security are eroded for certain groups in contexts of cultural and normative change, while the social standing and prestige of others, especially those traditionally lower on the status hierarchy are rising, the stage is set for populist politics of resentment. Populists, especially but not only the right-​wing versions, excel in thematizing status and identity anxieties through the lens of the friend–​enemy binary, fomenting a politics of resentment that lays the blame for status decline and precariousness at the door of allegedly less deserving social groups (whose status is apparently on the rise), who are deemed not part of the “real people,” yet who are apparently privileged by the rhetoric and policies of establishment elites.122 The host ideology that populists latch onto regarding restoration of the status and greatness of “the real people” is typically an amalgam of nativist supremacy, patriarchy, religious moralism (in the west, Christian), and sovereigntist, racialized, ethno-​nationalism. The result of populist framing of status-​based identity politics and cultural clashes is affective political polarization, entailing resentment

48  Populism and Civil Society and scapegoating of minorities.123 At the extreme, it can lead to the evisceration of the common ground that undergirds a shared status order within which ordinary conflicts and competition among groups for status recognition occur. As Herbert Kitschelt recently noted, the risk is the emergence of competing status hierarchies, each with their own underlying cultural values, entailing severe culture clashes that seemingly make communication and compromise on the basis of shared cultural values impossible.124 Such status and identity clashes undermine the viability of democracy. But we want to caution against buying into the notion that a wholesale cultural shift of this sort has already taken place, leaving different social groups without any shared cultural values or criteria for discerning legitimate social status differences. While “culture clashes” entail disagreements about appropriate social norms and status anxieties/​losses (the demand side) are real, it is not the case that there exist no common cultural values shared by both sides of the divide. Indeed the claims of unfairness, discrimination, partiality, exclusion, unequal treatment, corruption, and lack of voice, leveled at the “establishment” by populists in the name of (newly) marginalized groups indicate the continued existence of common cultural values and principles of justice—​fairness, impartiality of law and public governance, inclusion, equality before the law, moral integrity of public officials, equal opportunity and voice, and social solidarity across differences. It is crucial to point this out, insofar as shared cultural values are the basis on which it is possible to advocate for an inclusive politics of social solidarity to address status anxieties and unfair inequalities linked to groups, as an alternative to populist politics of resentment. A shared cultural framework is the basis for disagreeing about the appropriate normative orders that institutionalize these values and for framing competing political projects in terms of democratic competition and compromise instead of existential conflicts between enemies. We will discuss alternative framings to populist status-​based identity politics in the conclusion to this book, in c­ hapter 5. Last but hardly least, the causal role of media-​based politics cannot be neglected by political science type explanations any more than sociological ones. We thus end the question of the short-​term analysis of the causes of populism with a turn to the role of media, especially new forms of communication linked to contemporary mass politics.

Populism and the Media All versions of the emergence of a significant populist challenge are highly conflictual, pitting street against street, or movement against party or street against government. The same remains true for even populist governments, as in

Populism: Why and Why Now?  49 Venezuela, Bolivia, and now in the United States. As we have seen in the case of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and should see in the case of Trump in the United States, populist leaders and parties can be accused of the same bait and switch tactics that have contributed to their success, whether in party formation or electoral victories of leaders. Here lies perhaps the greatest vulnerability of all populisms, a game that many players can play.125 Indeed, the internal conflicts, as will be shown in the case of the Tea Party, have to be dealt with first, if a populist actor is to win elections. Here, the common answer in personalism and demonization of the other would not lead to success without appropriate media strategies, which are fortunately for many populists massively available in both older and recent communication environments. It may even seem (though we will partially deny this in ­chapter 2) that mobilization and integration through associations or parties has been increasingly replaced by media appeals, depending on both decentralized structures and effective rhetorical and discursive strategies. The issue was already insisted on by Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol’s treatment of the Tea Party, on its road to Trump.126 They point to two dimensions of the role of the media, colloquially called “megaphone” and “cheerleader.” Being a megaphone or an echo-​chamber is crucial for electoral purposes since grassroots mobilization is ultimately only of minorities, however large. The message of the populist movement can only get to sufficient number of people via the media, a role that was once played by the old forms of communication of newspapers, radio, and television for historical versions of populism. The role of cheerleader distinguishes the media role from modern liberal notions of the free, objective, and fact-​based journalism.127 It was right-​wing media populists who first became nakedly partisan, shifting the emphasis from the news to commentary and editorializing. Williamson and Skocpol speak of an uneven playing field, where nakedly right-​wing outlets like FOX dominate in their political influence over the media style of liberal journalism represented by CNN, which makes an effort to present both sides of controversies.128 But this very situation has led, for competitive reasons, to politization also on the other side, typified by the commentaries and even the news reporting of an MSNBC. Indeed today it would be difficult not to identify the New York Times, Washington Post, and indeed CNN as leaning to the left or the center left. As Benjamin Moffit shows, politically commitment really consists of two roles in one. The intention of mobilization is obvious, but that of organization is less so. As Williamson and Skocpol argue, in the process of the reconciliation of internal tensions within the grassroots, and between the grassroots and national levels, media figures and programs may play an even greater and certainly more visible role than advocacy organizations and party sympathizers. Both Moffit and Waisbord demonstrate in detail that there is a distinction among several ways media strategies of populists operate.129 To begin with, in relation to the still

50  Populism and Civil Society important liberal and traditional media, there has been a critique and denunciation of what is called “fake news,” imported from elements of the radical left. The purpose is to liberate populists from the threats of what is now called “fact checking” and to motivate tuning in to outlets more supportive of the populist leader or movement. This does not mean that the commercial liberal media can be entirely neglected, but participation in their programs now commonly takes the form of staged events, producing provocations and personalities of “news value” that cannot be disregarded. Next, more effectively, wealthy or prominent media supporters of populism can generate their own programs of critique and commentary that popularizes the main terms of discourse and grievances that political leaders will be able to simply assume. Even more common is for populist leaders, especially those with media experience like Berlusconi and Trump, to develop a style of performance130 that is especially effective with some mass audiences. Elements of this include calculated use of verbal and emotional transgression, crisis talk appealing to deep fears and insecurities, self-​identification with ordinary people while at the same time implying deep internal knowledge of the system attacked and to be replaced (“I alone can fix it”), and use of coded language to appeal to deep resentments and prejudices. Extreme personalism is the result, reinforcing the key dimension of populist discourse. Finally there is the exploitation of the potentials of the new, decentralized internet-​based media that some interpreters emphasize above all factors.131 We know of course that the traditional media allowed the intensification of populist politics, even if more oratorical abilities and deeper psychological insight for demagogues were called for than currently seem to be necessary.132 Given such leaders, radio and television were quite adequate for the purposes of Mussolini, Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and George Wallace. But today’s populist mobilizations face the problem of greater internal heterogeneity and division than ever before. The solutions suggested by Laclau (reference to “the people,” chain of equivalence among demands, charismatic leadership, demonization) work but not sufficiently to win elections, a problem he amazingly enough disregards. Here the new media offer, beyond attempted reconciliation, bifurcation or pluralization, or what is called “hybridization.”133 The decentralized structure both of cable television and especially the internet allows for different strategies of appeal to different audiences. These can be extreme radical and potentially violent appeals to part of the base, or more moderate but still to the right of all established parties appealing to more traditional activists. Finally, even more pragmatic ideas can be offered to the wider electorate, including single, targeted solutions like tariffs and trade protectionism, immigration controls, or merely damning revelations about opponents. On all these levels the critique of “fake news” is common, unifying the audiences, but the positive claims and solutions (if there are any) and even the specific choice of enemies can be

Populism: Why and Why Now?  51 partially different. In the case of the Tea Party for example it was such differentiated media strategies rather than implausible attempts at synthesis that allowed the holding together of the incompatible religious radicalism and secular libertarian views, support for some welfare state programs, and opposition to government intervention and taxation. Within the world of populisms, media strategies can play different roles. It is incorrect to identify right populism with the old and left with the new media since both types use both forms. It is true however that it is more on the left than the right that experiments in media participation in candidate and program selection have been undertaken.134 Very likely, right-​wing media strategies have been more personalistic, though reliance on regular television programs for Chavez, Correa, and even Pablo Iglesias speaks against this. However we draw this distinction, the pervasive effect of media populism has been “mediatization” and the weakening of deliberate elements in liberal democracy. Several interpreters argue that at issue is not only the effective use of media by populists but also the reverse, the colonization of politics by a media logic, or mediatization. This process135 can be understood as a cause, or a condition, of the possibility of populist politics, but it is even more its result that requires non-​populist forces to adhere to many of the same patterns. According to Waisbord, even without and before populism “media logic is characterized by spectacularization, personalization, sensationalism, tabloidization, conflict centered discourse and simplified rhetoric.”136 Moffit too speaks of “simplification, polarization, personalization, stero-​typization, emotionalization, dramatization and the prioritization of conflict.”137 Since all these devices existed before and outside of populism, it may be best to understand mediatization as an elective affinity of two complexes: populism and contemporary media worlds that can play a causal role in either direction. Most likely however the contemporary proliferation of populism, on the short term at least, cannot be fully understood without mediatization. We will speak of the authoritarian results of contemporary populism, left and right, in several chapters. But mediatization, whether a cause, effect, or both, is in itself problematic for modern democracy. The norms of the liberal public sphere, and deliberative democracy of course, should not be confused with the actual workings of the representative system. As we have argued, even populism is justified in criticizing the oligarchic, cartel-​like tendencies of modern party systems and the insufficiently representative nature of modern representation. Nevertheless, the existence of a plurality of publics in civil society and the persistence of its norms of free and open discussion respectful of genuine information and factuality, is a pre-​condition for bringing really existing democracies closer to their norms and making parties and representatives at least partially or potentially accountable. Even elections cannot function for such a purpose without

52  Populism and Civil Society independent information and critique. As Waisbord argues, mediatization of politics and the politization of media together erode this possibility. In populist versions, critical discussion among opponents is replaced by extreme animosity that leads to the “balkanization of the public sphere.” With that said however, given long term contradictions within democracy, crisis tendencies within our models of representation, and the supply of actors ready to occupy market niches opened up by unmet political demands, media activity and logic help to mobilize and integrate the mass bases of viable challenge by populists. Beyond the degradation of political discourse, the ultimate danger here is the disfiguration of constitutional democracy.138

2

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party As indicated in c­ hapter 1, a key element in populist success at coming to power is the emergence of political entrepreneurs, mobilization leaders, and parties who supply the appropriate rhetoric, worldview, and strategy to generate support. We discussed the role played by the bait and switch tactics of establishment parties in preparing the ground for populists to capitalize on the pent up “demand” for political representation, or voice—​left unarticulated and unsatisfied by established parties. At issue are not only rhetoric or even the plausibility and seductiveness of the narratives offered but also the dynamics produced by anti-​establishment populist mobilizations and parties seeking to fill the available political space. This chapter focuses on those dynamics by analyzing the distinctive logic of populist mobilization and party formation. Our concern is the impact of successful populist projects on parties, party systems, and the political norms and practices of political competition and cooperation in democratic polities. Populists situate themselves in the democratic imaginary and purport to improve the quality of democracy by creating party forms that are supposedly more democratic and more responsive to “the people” than established parties. But we will argue that the populist worldview and logic involve the creation of a specific form of anti-​establishment, anti-​party party and a mode of party politics that undermines instead of enhancing democracy. This is so whether populist parties emerge “from below” out of social initiatives, from above through the machinations of skilled political entrepreneurs, or both. The relevant features of the populist worldview and logic are its Manichean framing of “the people” as good and entrenched elites as evil; its pars pro toto logic whereby the populist party (and its leader) poses as the sole voice and representative embodiment of the will of the sovereign people; its friend–​enemy conception of politics that sews distrust of other parties and movements; and its anti-​establishment, anti-​elitist stance that favors movement type dynamics and hollow organizational party forms. Populist mobilizations are certainly not the first to claim to speak in the name of “the people.” Nor are populist parties (that also make that claim) the first anti-​establishment parties with an anti-​ party rhetoric to succeed in mobilizing supporters and in entering legislatures or governments. But populist mobilization has a telos of power and thus tends to morph into political parties, while populist leaders and parties, even without an initial social movement background, are impelled to rely on movement type

54  Populism and Civil Society mobilization within civil society (typically managed from above) to maintain their anti-​party, anti-​establishment posturing. Yet populists did not invent the party form that they invariably gravitate toward—​the movement party—​ although their version of it has distinct features and dynamics specific to populism. Put differently, since only they purportedly represent the “authentic people,” a claim that needs periodic acclamatory affirmation, populist parties cannot normalize or de-​radicalize their populist movement style rhetoric even when in government, while remaining populist. Instead they blur the logic of movements and parties undermining the democratic roles of both.1 Thus even when they cooperate with other parties in government, they do so for strategic instrumental reasons but cannot really accept the legitimacy of the opposition or even of their coalition partners. If populist parties are the sole voice of the authentic people, they are the part that purports to be the whole, and thus their logic militates strongly against the acceptance of party pluralism and of the opposition except for strategic or instrumental reasons. Our thesis is that the populist worldview and logic leads populist parties to assume a form and political dynamic that undermine rather than improve the quality of democratic party systems and democratic norms of political competition and behavior. The analytic distinction between political parties and social movements and how they do or ought to interrelate in a democratic polity is thus important. But it has been a relatively neglected topic by political scientists and democratic theorists in part because of the division of labor between sociologists who study movements and political scientists who study parties.2 Accordingly, to make our case, we first discuss social movements as a specific form of politically oriented contentious collective action. (1) We analyze the logic of social movements—​that of influence—​taking as our baseline the new social movements that emerged in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. Much like the movements of that epoch, contemporary populist mobilizations typically criticize “the establishment,” and challenge traditional political parties as elitist usurpers of popular sovereignty. They too, invoke people power and argue against hierarchical party relations, often in favor of horizontal linkages, participatory forms of democratic inclusion of ordinary citizens in politics, and direct “unmediated” relations with their “representatives” as an alternative to elite organizational forms and control of the political system.3 Certainly, the relation of movements to parties and the party system can be democracy enhancing.4 Populist mobilizations occupy the same space as social movements insofar as they emerge in civil society and organize around neglected demands. But we will argue that despite similarities to the rhetoric and anti-​establishment stances of the new social movements, populist mobilizations (and political entrepreneurs) differ insofar as they are driven by their logic to

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  55 seek power and hence to enter the party political arena either as new parties or by capturing existing ones.5 The question, then, becomes what type of political party populists form and how this impacts the party system in democracies. (2) We discuss the ideal typical forms of political parties that have emerged since the late 19th century—​ the party of notables, the mass party, the catch-​all party, the cartel party, and the movement party—​focusing on the West but with relevance elsewhere. Our interest is twofold: first in how the evolving structure of the catch-​all and cartel party (among other factors)—​in particular their “hollowing out” and movementization compared with the mass party—​provide the political opportunity structure for populist electoral movements and leaders to emerge and succeed as anti-​party parties and/​or to capture existing parties. Second, we look at how these types provide the elements for the particular party form created by contemporary populists. We show that populist parties combine key features of the catch-​all party type with the movement party form: Populist parties are typically catch-​all movement parties. Insofar as they construct what Laclau calls chains of equivalence across a wide variety of demands and interests so as to appeal to a majority of voters, they resemble catch-​all parties. But they also invariably adopt the movement party form, although their appeal is neither restricted to a single issue nor wed to programmatic goals, as is typical of non-​populist movement parties. And while they can be hollow in ways similar to cartel parties, they certainly do not join cartels. After considering the ideal types of contemporary movements and parties and their relation to populism in the abstract, (3) we turn to the three possible causal relations of these forms within the populist phenomenon: origins of mobilization from above, below, and from an in-​between level of oppositional parties. Focusing on comparative cases we demonstrate that, irrespective of the exact causal nexus, the outcomes are remarkably similar, namely the creation of a new form synthesizing characteristics of party and movement. Thus the theory and practice of the movement party form, especially the dynamics of the versions emergent in the 1980s, merit special attention. In the next section, we turn to this: (4) movement parties typically form around issues neglected by established parties. They initially have strong ties to movement forms and rhetoric, which is often absolutist, moralistic, and uncompromising. However, when they succeed in entering legislatures they go through ideal typical transformations—​a process of normalization—​anticipated by the theory of movement parties, in light of the tensions and contradictions inherent in merging movement and party forms. But populist movement parties cannot become “responsible parties” while insisting on their populist identity. Populists thrive by criticizing political parties as such and typically present as “movement parties.” We will analyze the theory and practice of movement parties to see how

56  Populism and Civil Society these illuminate the dynamics and tensions in populist exemplars and yet fail to predict outcomes regarding populist versions. In the next section, (5) we turn to the impact of specific features of populist logic and worldview on populist parties, party systems, and political competition. We focus on three features addressed separately in the literature: the regression of parties into factions, the emergence of a distinctive type of severe polarization, and the emergence of a new type of anti-​party party (a catch-​all movement party) tied to the enduring movementization of populist anti-​party parties. Populist versions of movement parties pose as anti-​party parties, or “non-​parties” often referring to themselves as movements, even as they participate in the electoral party political game. But they cannot avoid the tensions inherent in the movement party form, nor can they normalize and accept being ordinary political parties in a pluralist, democratic party system, due to their anti-​establishment stances and populist worldview. It will then be clear why populist movement parties tend to distort and undermine more-​or-​less functioning, institutionalized, pluralist, democratic party systems. In short, they risk triggering mirroring dynamics in other parties, potentially creating a destructive spiral of factionalism, rhetorical escalation, and polarization. This undermines the ability of parties and party systems to perform their most basic functions. Part of the problem is that populist movement parties one-​sidedly stress the expressive relationship with their base over other functions parties typically carry out. (6) We discuss these functions and the distinctive type of “expressive” linkages populist parties tend to foster with their supporters (clientelistic, plebiscitary, “charismatic,” acclaim oriented, instead of programmatic, deliberative, or discursive) that others may be tempted to imitate. We will show that because populism in power cannot normalize and re-​ differentiate the party movement form while remaining populist, populist leaders in power exacerbate polarization, seeking to de-​legitimate the opposition and exclude its supporters (deemed enemies) from benefits and opportunities provided by populist governments. As we argue in ­chapter 3, there is thus an elective affinity of populist parties in power with authoritarianism. But their success is not inevitable: other parties have a choice of how to respond to populist strategy, and counter-​movements also have choices about resisting and finding alternatives to populist logic.

Social Movements: Their Logic and Limits The 20th century ushered in mass politics in Western democracies. As Dahl influentially noted, there are three ideal typical modes of articulating collective political interests and aims in a democracy: interest groups, political parties, and

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  57 social movements.6 Interest groups seek influence, lobbying, and bargaining with politicians, offering information, money, persuasion, and credible threats regarding electoral support. When they seek to influence those in power over the long term, they invest in organizational structure, develop a chain of command and a division of labor among professional lobbyists, etc.7 Political parties are organizations that aim to get control of government to wield the state’s authoritative political power to make collectively binding decisions. Their function is to mobilize, represent voters, aggregate interests, and govern.8 Social movements, in contrast to both parties and interest groups, are typically networks of protest groups engaged in non-​institutionalized forms of contentious collective action with the goal of social transformation.9 Like parties they aggregate interests and mobilize large masses of people and committed supporters in pursuit of a collective purpose, but do so outside the ordinary channels of political communication and without organizing to win elections to enter government. Like interest groups they may speak for specific group concerns, but insofar as they are political they endorse ends that can become binding for the wider community. We focus on the shifting relations between movements and parties and the impact of populist logic on them. The types of social movements that matter in this regard are those that are political in a specific sense, namely their means of collective action can be recognized as legitimate and their ends can become binding for the wider community.10 The distinctiveness of social protest movements is that they engage in contentious politics, purporting to articulate generalizable interpretations of values and aims, needs and interests of groups that political parties have allegedly failed to adequately represent. The literature on the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 70s is enlightening in this regard.11 Viewing movements as a normal part of democratic politics, analysts were able to specify their specific locus, stakes, logic, dynamics, strengths, and weaknesses. The locus classicus of social movements is civil society, where they are born as voluntary associations and mobilize to challenge exclusion and unjust “private” and public power.12 Indeed the emergence of electoral politics and of popular participation in national politics, and the grant of legality to electoral associations and assemblies provided a claim to legality for associations and assemblies that were not electoral along with the rights to publicize, demonstrate, assemble, etc. Put differently, democratic electoral party politics became an incentive to social movements to operate in civil society and select action repertoires like the demonstration, the strike, boycotts, or sit-​ins not controlled by political parties.13 Whether one stresses the strategic aspects of social movements oriented to the pursuit of collective interests by looking into the political opportunity structure, resource mobilization, choice of frames (Tilly et al.); their symbolic dimensions (orientation to visibility and contestation of norms and interpretations of shared values (Touraine, Melucci); or the

58  Populism and Civil Society identity-​oriented dimensions of social movements seeking recognition, autonomy, and revalorization of their status in society (Pizzorno) thereby fostering reflexivity about the creation of collective identities, it is clear that the stakes of social movements engaged in contentious politics must be understood both as defensive and offensive.14 Social movements and counter-​movements construe the cultural models, norms, and institutions of civil society as key stakes of social conflict. They defend society in Polányi’s sense from the predations of market and against administrative logics (Habermas’s colonization thesis) but are proactive in that they develop the communicative infrastructure of social life, potentially leading to the reinterpretation of social identities and norms in an egalitarian and inclusive direction but also generating counter-​movements against such interpretations.15 Finally contemporary social movements in civil society are supposed to be and generally are pluralistic. While they struggle with the relevant counter-​movement, in distinction to revolutionary movements in the past they do not purport to be the only legitimate association or movement in civil society, or the only true voice of the unitary people.16 Indeed initially, issue movements (feminist, ecological, civil rights) may ally with other collective actors broadening their influence and appeal. They are, in short, in and of civil society, thriving on and accepting its intrinsic pluralism. While their quintessential locus is civil society, movements have a specific political logic and relationship to institutional party politics and the state: the politics of influence. Movements don’t organize to stand for election, enter parliament, and govern. They are not political parties. Instead they seek to influence those political organizations that do form and go on to enter the political system and governments and exercise authoritative political power. Their mode of organizing is indicative of their distinctive logic of influence: it is informal, ad hoc, discontinuous, context-​sensitive, and often egalitarian.17 They don’t develop highly differentiated organizational structures; they typically have rudimentary membership rules, staffs, programs, and tend to avoid membership dues, relying instead on donations, networks, and voluntarism; and they often (but not always) favor participatory as opposed to plebiscitary forms of interaction.18 The representative function of social movements is thus different from that of political parties. Although they do articulate ends and norms that can become binding for the wider community, they rely on other organizations (parties) to mediate these into authoritative, collectively binding decisions. Since they typically seek to influence, not exercise institutionalized political power, they are freed from the responsibilities of governing and are under little pressure to temper their demands. Indeed movements tend to frame their concerns and ends in principled, non-​negotiable terms and in moralistic antinomies: yes/​no, us/​them, desirable/​intolerable.19 While all movements contain fundamentalist purist wings as well as more “realist,” “self-​limiting” ones, the former tend to be

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  59 louder.20 Accordingly, their relation to political parties and opponents is unlike that of interest groups or other parties. Claus Offe for example argues that they are incapable of negotiating or bargaining because they cannot make credible commitments on behalf of those they “represent” or speak for. Movements lack the relevant properties of formal organizations, such as the internal binding-​ness of representative decisions, by virtue of which formal organizations ensure the terms of the political deal will be honored.21 This, in addition to the high moralistic value and priority ascribed by movements to their demands, renders compromise both difficult and potentially self-​defeating. It is worth reminding the reader that this positive assessment of the place of social movements in the action repertoire of citizens in democracies was and remains contested.22 Indeed, the pluralist-​consensus school in political science, hegemonic in the 1950s and early 60s in the United States, together with the collective behavior school in sociology, did address “mass movements” and contentious unconventional “collective behavior” in a relatively quiescent period, but construed them as threats to democracy, not as normal features of democratic politics. They deemed interest group and party politics as rational, moderating, and the only acceptable form of democratic participation besides voting.23 Clearly informed by the recent past of fascist, National Socialist, and Communist movements and movement parties and the disastrously destructive, anti-​ democratic governments they set up once in power, the respective political and social theorists embraced the post-​war consensus that saw economic growth, national security, and some version of the welfare state based on class compromise as the positive sum basis for political democracy mediated exclusively through party competition. Accordingly, they construed un-​institutionalized, unconventional mass collective action as deviant, irrational, exceptional, and dangerous—​as a response to and against modernization that, like anti-​system party movements (fascist or communist), had to be contained and which would eventually dissipate once the benefits of modernity and progress were secured.24 This consensus was challenged with the rise of “the new social movements” in the 1960s and 70s. As indicated earlier, new theoretical paradigms were devised to analyze their strategies, identities, and democracy-​enhancing roles.25 The progressive civil society based movements—​civil rights, feminism, ecology, and peace—​articulated issues that were excluded from the producer oriented welfare state compromise and by the restriction of politics to party competition and negotiations between select interest groups (labor unions and business organizations) and the state. They rejected discriminatory, exclusionary, and repressive cultural stereotypes and denounced socioeconomic injustices based on denigrated, marginalized identities as well as the failure of parties to translate their concerns into the arena of institutionalized politics and public policy. The role of the new movements in undermining civil privatism, and in mobilizing public

60  Populism and Civil Society opinion and social protest action in the civil and political public spheres, came to be seen by many social theorists as a key factor in the further democratization of formally democratic polities and civil societies. There were also “fundamentalist” elements in the new social movements that opposed “the establishment,” challenged the procedural and constitutionalist features of liberal (and social democratic) democracies, rejected the differentiation between parties and movements, and called for alternatives to party politics in the name of movement purity and participatory democracy. Criticizing the “legalistic” “merely” formal character of constitutional democracy and rejecting the power-​oriented, interest-​based party politics associated with it, respective theorists and activists portrayed the popular forms of direct participation in their social movement as prefiguring a radical “truly democratic” alternative to party politics. They wanted not only inclusion into or influence on but also radical transformation of the party political system and the old political paradigm. If they remained outside the actual party politics, the purist anti-​establishment factions in the various movements and their organic intellectuals’ oppositional stances could nevertheless play a democratizing role by signaling new needs, triggering responses of other parties toward inclusion of the excluded, etc. Yet no social movement can sustain militancy on a society-​wide basis in the long term, and insofar as they are politically oriented, movements do want to strongly affect politics and social transformation. They thus face a tri-​lemma of mutually exclusive options.26 They can: (a) organize as a separate political party; (b) stay neutral between the major parties, retain autonomy, and act as a pressure group; or (c) ally with an existing party to gain influence within it as a fraction among other fractions.27 Indeed many established political parties began as movements: one need only think of the parties spawned by the labor movement and their competitors in the shape of religious movements and parties among others on the right.28 Choices depend on a variety of factors, not least of which are the electoral system and the shape, strength, and efficacy of existing political parties. It is notoriously difficult today to form a third party in the first-​past-​ the-​post, winner-​take-​all electoral system of the United States, unlike in the 19th century when groups and movements shut out from major parties regularly formed third parties, the most noteworthy success being the Republican’s emergence as a new party.29 In European proportional representation (PR) systems, new parties have more success. But it is also clear that movements acting as pressure groups while remaining neutral between the dominant parties risk having their influence on the political system remain very limited. It is equally so that existing parties may preempt and coopt movement demands that have a wide appeal if they think it means winning votes. For the new social movements of the 1960s–​80s, the choice was between acting on the level of culture in the public spheres of civil society (Touraine, Melucci),

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  61 generating forms of influence on parties (Cohen, Cohen and Arato), creating alliances with and within parties (Offe, Schlozman), or forming new parties.30 Because of their interest in protecting their new forms of life, unrestricted forms of discussion and self-​expression, forming parties was seen as a dangerous trap involving cooptation. Some of the new social movements, however, did participate in the electoral game, forming what they portrayed as anti-​party parties. Yet these too could play a democratizing role so long as they remained out of power (with other established parties taking up their issues), or, once elected, if they abandoned their fundamentalist logic, anti-​establishment and anti-​party rhetoric, and accepted differentiation between the movement and party aspects of their organization along with the legitimacy of the opposition, compromise, and alliances. Some successful attempts were made to adopt a dualistic movement and party strategy that maintained a relationship and differentiation between the two forms. The evolution of the European Green parties is a case in point.31 The other alternative was to ally with an existing party and become a viable fraction within it. However, as McAdam has argued drawing on the American experience of the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the New Left, a risk here is the movementization of parties and severe polarization of politics.32 Important social movements typically generate counter-​movements. Indeed, the segregationist, racist, anti-​feminist, anti-​secular, nativist counter-​movements along with the populist leaders they spawned like George Wallace, are a case in point. They can also generate political entrepreneurs within political parties, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who pick up on the reactive discontent and devise strategies to capitalize on it by shifting party politics accordingly.33 If as independents or as party fractions they succeed in replacing traditional hierarchical party structures and procedures that once ensured party control over candidate selection with movement forms of “participatory democratic institutions,” such as primaries, outside funding, and now digital modes of direct communication, then this paradoxically can undermine instead of fostering the autonomy and effectiveness of parties.34 The anti-​establishment, anti-​elitist, anti-​hierarchical bias of movement power within parties may seem more “democratic” and inclusive than party elites in smoke-​filled back rooms deciding everything, but it also can also be a sham, foster extremism, and exacerbate political inequality.35 The outcome of the movementization of parties is thus ambivalent for constitutional democracy.36 There are some parallels but also important differences in the contemporary version of movementization and supposed democratization of party politics embraced polemically by contemporary populists who once again insist on direct participatory inclusion of ordinary citizens in anti-​party movement parties (and direct connections through digital media, rallies, and other forms

62  Populism and Civil Society of acclaim with leaders) that substitute for party hierarchies and more mediated representative forms.37 We will return to this issue later. Suffice it to say for now that populist parties, especially when in power are hardly likely to de-​dramatize, abandon their fundamentalist friend–​enemy logic, endorse the differentiation between movement and party logics, or abandon their anti-​ establishment, anti-​party party stance. Since our interest is in specific populist movement/​party dynamics, we focus on Dahl’s first two options: the formation of alliances by movements entering into (and capturing) an existing party and the formation by movements of a new political party; and add a third, the creation by charismatic political entrepreneurs of their own “movement” counterparts. But first we turn to the analysis of political parties, their contemporary form, and their ideal typical role in democratic politics to see how movementization becomes possible and what is distinctive about the movement party form populists embrace.

Political Parties and Their Transformation E. E. Schattschneider famously wrote, “political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties . . . the condition of the parties is the best possible evidence of the nature of any regime.”38 Political parties are Janus-​faced. While many original parties were parliamentary clubs, modern (“external”) parties generally emerge in civil society as voluntary associations. They become the key actors in political society insofar as they are oriented toward getting control of governments. In power, in fact if not in law, parties temporarily become part of the government. Indeed, this is captured by Schattschneider’s concise definition of political parties: “A political party is an organized attempt to get control of government.”39 Their logic in a democracy is thus the logic of power: attaining public power and exercising it by making collectively binding decisions. The degree to which an ideal typical model of party government in a democracy has been realized varies and certainly different party types and party systems are compatible with it. Shifts in party type and party functions are normal. But recent shifts in party type in the political environment have led to what many refer to as the hollowing out and movementization of political parties in both Western Europe and the United States, undermining their ability to perform their classic functions.40 We discuss the hollowing out and movementization of parties in this and the following section, respectively.41 These shifts matter with respect to the rise of the populist anti-​party party and its organizational dynamics, as will become evident—​and may lead to developments that fundamentally alter the way the party competition functions in democracies.42

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  63 The major party types that have been discussed in the literature are parties of notables, the mass party, the catch-​all party, and the cartel party, although the latter is more apt as a term for a party system than for a party type.43 It should be clear that we are speaking of ideal types and, insofar as there is sequential development, it does not mean that older forms vanish or that the newest type prevails everywhere. The typology does not serve as a causal analysis or teleological framework but it is a useful heuristic with respect to the analysis of the specificity of contemporary populist parties. Parties of notables were made up of social elites with enough money, leisure, and reputation to be able to devote themselves to politics. This party type dominated prior to the democratization of the franchise in Europe and the United States. These parties were primarily legislative and electoral groupings. Mass parties emerged in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries in the aftermath of industrialization, extension of the franchise, elimination of property qualifications for the vote, and the availability of masses of new voters needing to be integrated into the electoral system.44 Ideal-​typically, mass parties involved registered dues paying memberships, programmatic linkages with members and supporters, local regional and national organizations of “militants” (cadres: the party on the ground), and party hierarchies consisting of professional politicians (the party in public office) and administrators (the party in central office paid by the party).45 According to Duverger’s classic analysis, the mass party was a community-​based agent of political socialization: integration and mobilization focused on providing members with a political identity and a mechanism for political participation.46 Ideally the principal (the party membership on the ground, party militants, and the party organization as a whole) orients the actions of the party in public office (its agent) to ensure that party program and projects are adhered to, although each element was relatively autonomous.47 Thus the mass party form involved complex, highly structured organizations organized into local, regional, national, federated structures (cadres) mediating between members and their representatives in parliament. The mass party emerged within civil society and was financially and organizationally autonomous from the state. It was this form in Europe that helped trigger the normative shift in the evaluation of political parties as essential to democracy insofar as they came to be seen as important for the political integration of enfranchised masses and for political representation of popular opinion and interests.48 Sociologically the mass parties spoke for a specific social base, although they developed broad programs oriented toward a distinctive conception of the common good. They were tantamount to informally closed political and social communities composed of collectivities of citizens defined in terms of occupation, working and living conditions, and religious practices. Social segmentation and partisan polarization along these lines was cemented by active

64  Populism and Civil Society organizational intervention by parties that helped construct networks of partisan loyalties and anchor them in affiliated associations and life worlds in civil society ranging from trade unions and churches to social clubs and youth organizations.49 Thus mass parties were organized into hierarchically structured (often federated) party sections that penetrated civil society locally and fostered coherent ideological, partisan political worldviews and collective identification around common values, solidarities, and party loyalties within specific segments of the population. Social closure, organizational intervention, and encapsulation anchored the new mass parties in civil society.50 Given their close linkages with a specific social base, such parties deemed representational integrity a priority—​ framing themselves as the political voice of their constituencies.51 Indeed the dual representative functions of integrating and mobilizing the citizenry into the polity and articulating and aggregating social and political interests were deemed key tasks of the traditional mass party, equal in importance to the procedural roles involving recruitment of political leaders, staffing public offices, and organizing parliament and government.52 Yet debates over whether, when and where, and if ever it was the dominant party form are not new and persist.53 Recent analyses show that prior to WWII in Europe, few parties other than those on the left (with the exception of the German Catholic Centre Party in Weimar) adopted the mass party form.54 In the United States, the mass party type never took root. Instead society-​based electoral parties organized by professional politicians emerged in the early 19th century and various versions of what came to be called the catch-​all party (or people’s party: Volkspartei vs. Klassenpartei) proliferated after the civil war and throughout the 20th century.55 Duverger’s thesis of the modernity and inevitability of the mass party as a permanent organizational form between elections appears most apposite with respect to the 1950s.56 Indeed Otto Kirchheimer challenged Duverger’s prognosis early on, arguing that the mass party form was declining in prominence already by the 1960s.57 Kirchheimer famously argued that the catch-​all party, emergent in Western Europe in the late 1950s, was eclipsing the mass party.58 The catch-​all party, appealing to cross-​sections of the population, weakens the linkages of parties to a specific social segment in civil society and waters down ideological and programmatic appeals in attempts to gain wide electoral appeal.59 The decline in social segmentation, increased widespread education, and other transformations tied to the rise of post-​industrial society, including the rise of the welfare state, undercut the ground on which the mass party was built.60 The catch-​all party expands the power of party leaders at the expense of the rank and file and focuses on increasing generalized electoral support garnered through the use of marketing and communication experts. Organizational efforts turned away from the integration and socialization of voters and supporters. The expressive

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  65 function of the catch-​all party was altered, insofar as representational integrity of the respective segmented civil society groups’ interests became secondary to winning elections by wooing voters across traditional cleavages.61 This increased the assertiveness of the party in public office over the party on the ground (the middle level elites and intermediate party organs). The catch-​all party altered electoral competition by shifting toward trying to widen their social base via dilution of ideological commitments to capture “floating” voters. It also lowered the stakes of competition by fostering the use of veto capacity by interest groups not to thwart the other side but to strengthen one’s bargaining position. Thus if in the mass party interests belonged to the party’s subculture, in the case of the catch-​all party interests competed and were brokered.62 Cross-​cutting rather than segmental pluralism and the emergence of the new middle classes characteristic of post-​industrial society spurred the adaptation of the catch-​all party form, along with the new media techniques.63 Electorally driven with shallow ideological commitments, the catch-​all party abandoned the role of parties as agents of socialization and integration.64 But this party form mediated between civil society and the state.65 The shift from the catch-​all to the cartel party allegedly occurred over the last decades of the 20th century.66 Cartel parties offer even less clear programmatic policy choices to voters than their catch-​all predecessors due to similar developmental trends. They also have weak social roots and even greater involvement in the regulatory state and are less willing to play the role of strong opposition, less able to intermediate between civil society and the state, and less receptive to the demands and voices of civil society.67 Indeed, Katz and Mair argue that the mass and catch-​all party models based on the expression or representation of the interests of civil society is now defunct.68 In part this is due to the withering away of the party organizational infrastructure outside government—​the decline of mid-​level local and regional elites and intermediate party organs constituting the party on the ground, close to civil society, and receptive to its needs.69 Cartel parties thus become increasingly hollow, dominated by the party in public office (elected officials) whose power is greatly expanded to the detriment of the power and autonomy of the party in local and regional offices and of party militants.70 The elected party members in public office tend to rely on their own staff instead of on party organization and on state funding instead of party dues and other party resources.71 They accordingly become part of the regulatory state, severed from their foothold and expressive role in civil society, losing one half of their Janus face. Increasingly focused on “procedural functions,” like recruiting political leaders, staffing public offices, organizing parliament, and government, they come to have more in common with other established parties than with their own supposed principals and seek to exclude newcomers to the political scene. This is the cartel thesis. Since both the hollowing out and the cartel theses

66  Populism and Civil Society are important for understanding the structure and success of populist parties we look at each briefly in turn albeit in reverse order. The cartel appellation pertains specifically to the system characteristics of inter-​party dynamics. The term cartel implies inter-​party elite collusion in keeping out competitors and in benefiting from the power and patronage perks pertaining to running the regulatory state. It is invoked to account for policy convergence.72 As they become part of the state, parties allegedly develop an interest in cooperating with one another, gain the sense of being in the same boat, and thus tend to collude with one another in keeping out new entrants: hence the cartel thesis.73 Indeed the loss of relative autonomy vis-​à-​vis the state is complemented by greater distance from civil society and the evisceration of the cartel party’s role in expressing and representing or mediating the interests of civil society groups to the state.74 The hollowing out of parties, meaning a withering of the party on the ground (intermediate elites, militants, federated structures) evidenced in part by the decline in membership numbers is also a feature of US parties.75 Hollow parties are no longer robust presences in civil society on the local or regional level and they too seem decreasingly able to police their boundaries. On both sides of the Atlantic, hollowed out parties become shallow, opportunistic electoral organizations of elites, dependent on the personal charisma of the candidates seeking to control the legislature and the government, competing primarily over who wins rather than representing the interests, views, or needs of civil society groups or any general vision, program, or ideology. But a central feature of the cartel party thesis is the interpenetration of party and state evidenced by the key role of public resources and funding for parties—​obviously missing in the United States.76 There, funding comes not from the state but from the corporate rich, wealthy donors, or from myriad small donors not tied to the party organization or membership.77 Nonetheless, the organizational developments captured by the term hollowing out that Katz and Mair notice are pertinent there as well.78 The decline of old party hierarchies has, however, also involved a process of apparent internal “democratization” whereby ordinary, nominal members acquire the power, once held by intermediary party cadre and activists, to select candidates for public office. This is the flip side of the hollowing out thesis. The spread of the primary form in internal party processes is part and parcel of this development.79 While primaries for candidate selection were adopted much earlier in the United States, they have also proliferated in Europe so that by 2012 nearly 30% of candidates and leaders were selected in primaries, a phenomenon that did not exist in 1965.80 Yet the empowerment of nominal members regarding candidate selection, touted as “democratization,” has neither diminished the hollowing out of parties nor increased their membership. Instead “democratization” tends to eclipse the principle of delegation in favor of unmediated direct

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  67 participation fostering a plebiscitary approach to candidate selection already encouraged by the use of media such as television and the internet.81 We will return to the issue of “democratization” in the next section. Whether the features ascribed to cartelization of the party system are due solely to internal developments of the party form and to the emergence of a new party type, however, is questionable. We agree with Herbert Kitschelt and other critics that external developments matter more. We also suggest that instead of a new party form, the hollowing out of parties is the logical culmination of the catch-​all form and its proliferation, while the term “cartel party,” if apt, pertains to party systems rather than to a party type.82 Three elements of the cartel thesis, pertinent to the emergence and success of populism, have been challenged most tellingly by Kitschelt: (1) that party leaders are no longer attuned to voter preferences; (2) that ideological or policy convergence of rival parties is due to changes internal to party systems; and (3) that interparty cooperation is tantamount to cartel-​type collusion of established parties aimed at blocking new entrants into the political system.83 With regard to the first, it is precisely because parties are hollowed out and no longer rely on material and solidary selective incentives that maintained voter loyalty in the period of mass party organization that they are likely to be more rather than less sensitive to voter preferences.84 Regarding the second: established parties could hardly escape the classic prisoner’s dilemma all cartels face, namely strong incentives to defect absent powerful sanctions to keep them in the cartel and compliant. Public finance can’t achieve this, especially since the spoils are allocated in proportion to electoral success, thus creating incentives to outperform one another and embrace popular policy positions to lure voters.85 Like Kirchheimer before him, Kitschelt focuses on dynamics external to the competitive party system to account for policy convergence and voter dissatisfaction with parties rather than their capacity to form cartels. He argues that parties confront constraints coming from political economy (and legacies of institutional entrenchment)—​ the maturing of welfare states, the disappearance of a radical socialist alternative in the perception of elites and mass audiences, and a context of globalization that forces sharp economic policy challenges on all parties.86 These create a tri-​ lemma of trade offs between high employment, increased equality, and/​or fiscal responsibility. For example, by pursuing neo-​liberal economic policies of deregulation and privatization, government parties may abandon the social protectionist preferences of their own voters in the short run, not because they are a “political class” entrenched in a cartelized party system with preferences detached from those of their constituencies, but in light of future evaluation of their performance in a subsequent election when they will be held accountable.87 Third, the problem to be explained according to Kitschelt is not the persistence of powerful, established cartel parties but rather their electoral decline. Much

68  Populism and Civil Society like Kirchheimer’s position regarding Duverger’s prognosis about the mass party, Kitschelt concludes that the age of the cartel party is not at its beginning but at its end.88 The owl of Minerva does indeed fly only at night. The rise and success of populist parties (and/​or the capture of established parties by populists) confirms this. The point is that cartel parties fail to block new entrants or to coopt them by according them procedural rights in exchange for renouncing substantive impact on the content of political decisions.89 Clearly, the new populist parties are serious challengers that do not give up on their agenda in exchange for inclusion. Instead they challenge traditional parties by adopting a version of the movement party form wed to an anti-​party, anti-​establishment rhetoric. They succeed thanks in part to the inability of established cartel parties to respond to new demands, as they are strategically less mobile due to the veto power of rent-​seeking interest groups that block programmatic changes thus alienating large constituencies of unaffiliated voters and other deficits we described in ­chapter 1.90 But this does not refute the cartel thesis or the analysis of the hollowing out and other changes in parties noted by Katz and Mair, even if the term cartel has always been something of an exaggeration. We prefer a weaker version of the cartel thesis, namely that cartelization has been a strong tendency for a variety of reasons in the relevant party systems over the past half century and certainly is part of the political opportunity structure that enables populists to successfully mobilize. Furthermore, as will become clear, the current populist wave did not create the hollowing out of parties, or what we will call their movementization.91 But contemporary populists capitalize on and exaggerate these developments, by criticizing established parties rhetorically as elite cartels (la casta, partocracy) and purporting to avoid their dilemmas: by embracing movement party forms in the name of democratization and by denying that their version of the “anti-​ party” party is a party at all.

Populist Mobilization, Its Dynamics and Tensions: The Cases Political mobilization is often and rightly considered a definitional characteristic of populism. The relationship of mobilization to movement form and party activity is complex. Interpreters of populism often distinguish between mobilization from above and mobilization from below or, more precisely, between plebiscitary vs. participatory linkages between parties and movements. As indicated earlier, what all modern social movement theorists have done, whether following Touraine’s identity-​oriented or the strategic conception the resource-​ oriented perspective of Tilly, is restore the agency and subjectivity of societal actors.92 Thus the relationship between political and social actors is interactive in

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  69 all convincing theories of mobilization. Yet they are also distinct, and neither the contrast between the dominant role of parties and societal self-​organization nor the tension between the two can or should be eliminated. What is mobilization and what makes some versions populist? Charles Tilly defines mobilization as: “the process by which a group goes from being a passive collection of individuals to an active participant in public life.”93 Note that he replaced atomized individuals by groups, already associated and perhaps organized, thus rejecting the mass society thesis.94 It is this approach that informs contemporary studies of populism. Thus R. Jansen defined mobilization quite in line with the civil society argument as a “process of forming crowds, groups, associations and organizations for the pursuit of collective goals.”95 He proceeds to define “popular” mobilization as bringing “marginalized social sectors into publicly visible and contentious political action.” These become populist only if using a rhetoric that is “anti-​elite, nationalist [and] valorizes ordinary people.”96 Accordingly, neither rhetoric nor popular mobilization alone constitute populism; they must do so together. What Jansen calls the elective affinity between them is not a necessary connection, both populist rhetoric and popular mobilization, are possible on their own. There is an implication, reminiscent of early socialist debates concerning the role of vanguards in raising (class) consciousness, whether in Lenin’s version (the rhetoric or “theory” comes from above or outside those to be mobilized) or Luxemburg’s (the rhetoric represents a formulation of the deepest aspirations of the latter).97 It is here, that the uncertain threshold between supply and demand discussed in c­ hapter 1 returns for mobilization, between the categories “from above” and “from below,” but now as an empirical matter.98 No interpreter can neglect historical and contemporary cases where leaders or intellectuals introduce or revive populist rhetoric from above.99 Nor can one ignore the converse, when it arises from bottom up social discourse.100 Some analysts confine “populism” to the top-​down version, but this neglects the very possible Luxemburgian option of movement from the grassroots to a leadership that only raises what is implicitly there to political consciousness and even the possibility that a mobilization from above gains independence from its initial instigators. Versions of these trends have been documented for Bolivia, Venezuela, and, in part, Spain.101 Thus for logical and empirical reasons, the tension in the concept should not be removed by mere definitional fiat. We will focus on some of the main empirical exemplars, looking at mobilization by populist parties, by governments, and from below within civil society, and the tensions inherent in the hybrid movement party form, that arise in each version.

70  Populism and Civil Society

Mobilization by or with Parties Mobilization by parties can take different forms that are hardly reducible to a strategic market oriented effort.102 A new group can emerge as a political party in the first place, playing the role of a framework of solidarity or a community for its members without initially aspiring to a directly political role. The first version of the Bolivarian Circles in Venezuela took this form as the cells of a new party, MBR200, formed by Chavez and his military and civil allies.103 The far-​right Jobbik in Hungary emerged more or less in this manner—​perhaps aping the early history of the now “grown up” FIDESZ—​first as a youth organization in 2002 and as a party a year later.104 In contrast, as in the case of the Pro Köln in Germany and Casa Pound, a group can emerge on the street or cultural level, next to parties, producing at times a conflicting relationship between two or more organizations. In these cases, the party may even consider the social movement organization as a competitor, as a challenger, and a channel away for it, as did the British National Party (BNP) for the English Defense League (EDL).105 Even in such a context the social movement can play a key role for both recruitment and even the normalization of the party, especially if it had an authoritarian past. It is important that the movements can claim the mantle of expanding democracy with much greater authenticity than a formerly authoritarian party, performatively demonstrating the presence and energy behind political demands excluded by the previous cartelized party oligarchy. They can also be transmission belts for short-​term inclusion and radicalization, needed if the parties are to expand their electoral base. Beyond a simple model of initially separate but linked party and movement, a party such as the Italian Lega can itself generate a large variety of civil organization from sports clubs to cultural and recreational associations, identity building venues, service delivery organizations, internet networks, and, on a more political level, vigilante groups supposedly in charge of local security.106 Such associations of course may be helpful during elections but can also take on the role of independent groups in street-​level actions like demonstrations, boycotts, and even provocation of violence. In the case of the Lega, some of its groups helped to mediate through formal organizational separation the distance between its radical national profile and the important pragmatic local one. The purpose of a party out of power creating a civil society based movement can be more directly and explicitly political, as it was for the Civic Circles created by FIDESZ or more exactly its leader, then ex-​prime minister Viktor Orbán, in Hungary. This happened after the first governmental term of FIDESZ and its electoral defeat in 2002.107 Orbán, who in 1987 wrote a thesis on civil society focusing on the Polish Solidarity of the 1970s and 80s, was fully aware of both the importance of this level strategy in the collapse of Communism, as well as its

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  71 demobilization in the period after “the regime change.”108 FIDESZ played a role in both, first as a militant youth organization and later as a fairly elitist political party. Knowing the experience of defeats of the revolution of 1956 and even of Solidarity, Orbán feared not only the passivity of his supporters after electoral defeat but also their sectarian and impotent radicalization.109 Thus, after losing governmental power, abandoning the earlier Thatcherite and elitist profile of FIDESZ, he sought not only to create a catch-​all party, but, as previously, to rebuild militant civil associations as the very term Civic Circles (Polgári körök) testifies. The experiment of transferring the antagonist from the earlier dictatorial Communist regime to an elected government did require some virtuosity. The job was made easier by the governmental dominance of the post-​Communist successor party, the Hungarian Socialists, who still relied on some of their older networks and organizations like the old official trade union. Nevertheless, the already populist idea of the real Hungary being present in the public sphere of the opposition, rather than in parliament and government, was highly ambivalent from the point of view of democratic norms. “The nation cannot be in opposition,” Orbán famously declared, identifying himself and his supporters with the whole. He was, as Béla Greskovits implies, aware of both Tocquevillian and Gramscian concepts of civil society and sought to both promote the explosion of voluntarism below and build hegemony in the national culture. Only when the two linked projects went forward, could the party itself be rebuilt. To accomplish all these tasks, he assumed personal coordination of the circles. He went so far as to construct the “5000th circle” led directly by himself from a dozen or more right-​wing and religious groupings. Thus in stressing civil or civic or bourgeois society, more was involved than just a name.110 The effort was phenomenally successful, leading to the emergence of thousands of groups with over 150,000 members, comparable in number to all the political parties, producing a huge mix of cultural, educational but also militant political activities. Undoubtedly electronic, internet-​based communication and organization helped, along with the support of right-​wing media, predating a similar combination by the Tea Party in the United States. There was also successful mobilization of the Circles in two elections, the first in 2006 allowing FIDESZ to displace all right-​wing parties (with the temporary exception of the neo-​fascist Jobbik that drew on mostly a younger constituency111). The second and greater electoral success was in 2010, which led to the famous constitution-​ making two-​thirds majority.112 It was earned in part by the new catch-​all character of the party and in part by the Circles being well positioned to exploit the advantages of local individual races in the highly disproportional mixed electoral system.

72  Populism and Civil Society In spite of such success, well before Trump’s, the civil-​political mix of this version of movement party remained exposed to tensions. The new catch-​all orientation of the party sought to address large numbers of voters, including those disadvantaged by neo-​liberal stabilization and European competition, by emphasizing pragmatic social protection. The Circles remained more radical and primarily committed to nationalist symbols, causes, and attitudes. Antagonism to party elites was only partially reduced by Orbán’s internal reorganization. Given the radical hostility of both party and movement to the social liberal coalition that was discredited by corruption revelations and its repressive acts vis-​à-​vis right-​wing demonstrators, the unity promoted by Orbán could be kept. Most likely, the very contradictions of the hybrid organization could be turned into an asset, yielding bifurcated electoral and media appeals to the rather different constituencies needed for victory. Nevertheless, independent nationalistically mobilized groups, that after the elections could have even turned to Jobbik, were a potential problem for the FIDESZ government. Thus the Civil Circles were formally dissolved, and in their place came an entirely top-​down form of mobilization leading to marches and demonstrations to support the government, the main one called the Peace March. Orbán, in short, maintained the hybrid form of the movement party even as he turned toward a catch-​all strategy, by capturing and coopting the movement, destroying its autonomy, and instrumentalizing it for power political purposes of his own. But this did not lead to mutual accommodation or normalization in Kitschelt’s terms (more on this later). The movement did not become a fraction among several in the party, willingly giving up its more extremist positions in return for real influence within the party on policy and personnel or candidate choices.113 Rather, Orbán’s populist strategy meant retaining movement style, friend–​enemy, anti-​establishment stances, escalating rhetoric and street mobilizations now triggered from above. Here the party captured the movement. Whereas elsewhere in Turkey and albeit much less convincingly in the United States, the claim could be made that the populist government still had to fight an entrenched “deep state,” in Hungary the extent of the victory of FIDESZ, and the thorough going purges and change of elite, made such a contention implausible. Thus, the officially designated enemy requiring top-​down mobilization became Europe and elite organizations like the Open Society led by Soros, who allegedly sought to impose immigrants on the Hungarian nation. The tensions, between populist government and original movement supporters, inherent in the movement party form, were thereby papered over, albeit not resolved through a form of “gleichschaltung.”

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  73

Mobilization by a Government or a Chief Executive Clearly a populist government in power, or more likely the head of its executive, can mobilize from above. In some definitions just this activity is a requirement for a government remaining, or in some instances becoming, populist.114 A very important case in point is the project of the Chavez government and especially of the president himself, who engaged in top-​down mobilization consistently, using a mix of constitutional, legal, and political forms.115 To be sure Venezuelan society had a large variety of often-​mobilized associations and groups before Chavez’s election as president. Some of these supported his effort to gain power by bringing down previous administrations, de-​legitimating cartelized parties, or, more directly, in the electoral effort including the election of the constituent assembly. Their independence however could turn out to be a threat, as happened during several junctures of the new regime. Nevertheless, there were significant attempts to incorporate or coopt some of them, and, more importantly, to create new associations and groups. To begin with, the new Chavista constitution of 1999116 claimed to establish a participatory and protagonist democracy, most likely under the impact of leftist allies117 for the moment incorporated in the Chavez party. Thus, the constitutional text, as well as organic laws and presidential decrees shortly after, established civil associations for particular purposes, like the constitutionally anchored municipal or local public planning councils (CLPPs), or water management (MTAs), and urban land regulation (CTUs).118 More importantly, even before the anti-​Chavez mobilization, demonstrations, and coup attempt (2001–​2002), the Bolivarian Circles were re-​established in a completely new form, with the supposed purpose of practicing direct or participatory democracy complementary and even superior to the representative form established in the constitution. Whether Bolivarians, who on the streets helped to bring down the coup, or the later Communal Councils, these militant associations were understood as fighting organs of the regime, or more exactly of the president himself. They were even said to be the expression of the constituent power, superior to all constituted powers, with Congress and the Courts (but certainly not the president!) in mind. As Goldfrank, Lopez Maya, and Madrid all indicate, the more horizontal and participatory CLPPs and other similar bodies were almost completely displaced by the two more centralized, presidentially led fighting organizations, the Bolivarians and the Communal Councils, each in its turn.119 The Chavista model has many defenders, who claim the independence of not only the civil associations but also the Bolivarian and Community Councils they see as genuine examples of “participatory and protagonist” democracy as claimed by the constitution. Others deny this and consider these movements, created from above, to have displaced the previous constitutional forms of civil

74  Populism and Civil Society society participation by vehicles controlled by the president primarily and thus by plebiscitary, clientelistic instead of horizontal, participatory linkages.120 Even to the extent the defenders of the newer groups were right, they would have to admit the highly conflict-​laden outcome, especially if factoring in the renewed activity of associations and movements that existed before the regime. Not only two sets of conflicting claims to embody the sovereign people emerged, as De La Torre convincingly shows, but mobilization from below and from above turned out to be incompatible. Many civil associations, union activists, and previously associated parties, some former supporters and allies, played important roles in causing the temporary fall of Chavez in 2002, the failure of his constitutional project of 2007 in a referendum, and the election of an anti-​Maduro National Assembly in 2015. At all these junctures the political councils, or fighting organs created by the regime took its side, leading to a dramatic polarization of society where each side claimed to speak on behalf of the people, understood as the citizens on the one side and the poor on the other.121 The internal tensions of the hybrid movement party structure in all its versions could not be resolved by Chavez, in part because he could not abandon the movement rhetoric, claims, and dynamics of the party thanks to his populist commitments, even once the autonomy of the movements (albeit created from above) was abolished. Escalation of rhetoric, monist claims, and movement style activist disruptions show that the populist version of the hybrid movement party in government could not normalize, accept political plurality, and avoid pernicious affective polarization, but instead resorted to increasing authoritarian means to maintain control.

Mobilization from below in Civil Society Among those who distinguish between top-​down and bottom-​up, plebiscitary and participatory forms of populism, Bolivia represents the favored case for the possibility of the second.122 We go along with this, but not with the idea that the movement and especially the government led by Evo Morales falls outside of populism altogether.123 It is certainly right to distinguish the origins of “movement left” parties such as the MAS in Bolivia from “populist machines” in Argentina and Peru, and even from top-​down populism in Venezuela and Ecuador. To be sure there has been bottom-​up mobilization in all these countries before the coming into power of populist governments. Everywhere, these helped to destabilize and displace previous governments, cartelized party systems, and parties deemed oligarchic. This is true of the Indignados movement in Spain and the emergence of Podemos, the rise of the 5 Star movement party (M5S) in Italy, and the development of Syriza in Greece in the context of the global justice and anti-​ austerity movements. But only in Bolivia did the crucial presidential candidacy

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  75 itself arise from one of the many movements, the coca grower’s union or association (Cocaleros) with its indigenous majority and its leader Evo Morales.124 Yet this association was only one of the many movements, peasant and worker, rural and urban, landless and small proprietor, indigenous and mestizo, men and women, that would lead to the organization of the hybrid electoral movement party, MAS (movement toward socialism).125 Moreover, most of the plurality of movements did not disappear with the organization and victory of the MAS, and many even formed a peak organization, the Pacto de Unidad, distinct from the political party and dedicated to a unique constitutional vision of a “plurinational state” that involved a different conception of the people than the unitary one characteristic of populism.126 Even if we can interpret the MAS as a project to fill a market niche vacated by oligarchic or bait and switch populist parties, neither the origins nor the political role of the Pacto can be explained by the market orientation. Yet it represented forces supplying the energy and in some contexts the defense of the mobilization based increasingly on the party, MAS. Interpreters like Madrid are right to detect plebiscitary, participatory, and liberal democratic elements in the political and constitutional projects of the Bolivian mobilization. While he and others demonstrate the eventual dominance of the plebiscitary component, that result was born of conflict and remained conflict laden. The independent social movements, the party and its leader, and the opposition, had different constitutional ideas, roughly along these three components (participatory, plebiscitary, liberal). All of them found their way into the newly elected constitutional assembly, and even the constitutional outcome. The state was defined as pluri-​national one along with important indigenous jurisdictional and linguistic rights, the presidency was made very strong, and traditional liberal and party rights were all affirmed. The achievement of this result was highly contentious, and the rules of constitution making in place were repeatedly violated.127 While deals had to be made, the plebiscitary presidency became the leading dimension of the three with majoritarian powers of appointment of judges and electoral commissioners that would be able to interpret the relationship and priority among the three types of democratic components. Yet, very much as in Venezuela the president himself was dissatisfied with the structure from the beginning, in particular the term limits enacted, to which he initially agreed. To increase the power of the executive, in line with the plebiscitary idea of delegative democracy, almost immediately attacks on independent institutions of “horizontal accountability” (the press, electoral commission, comptroller general’s office, and most importantly courts) took place. These were followed, as in Venezuela, by a series of attempts to enable the re-​eligibility of the popular president. After an unsuccessful attempt by Morales to remove his term limits by referendum, a highly controversial (and even nonsensical) decision of the packed Pluri-​national Constitutional Court was used for the same

76  Populism and Civil Society purpose.128 Thus even plebiscitary democracy was violated by authoritarian manipulation. Equally significant, probably, were intense conflicts of the populist government with indigenous organizations (movement and union) over their decentralization, autonomy, and national projects, violating both these principles and ecological considerations. The origins of a populist or ethno-​populist government in autonomous, allied movements from below thus had contradictory results. To be sure, the constitution that emerged incorporated participatory and liberal elements, and even limits to the dominant plebiscitary dimension. But the same constitution was bypassed, as in Venezuela and primarily around the same issue: presidential power of a leader purporting to embody the true people. Thus it is clear that the balance between the three types of democracy mentioned earlier was displaced in the populist direction, first in a plebiscitary and then in an even more authoritarian trajectory.129 Yet it is also fair to conclude with De La Torre that the unique origins of the Bolivian left populist government in social movements led to an outcome with the presidency being more limited than under other populist and delegative democratic forms. Limitation however did not mean stability, especially when the plebiscitary or authoritarian instinct led to a second or third round of conflict over presidential re-​eligibility, with the intensification of polarization, and the successful challenge by a movement led by the opposition, leading to the fall of Morales. Here in short, the strategy of gleichschaltung and cooptation failed leading to a contentious split of the movement party into its component parts. Such conflicts were difficult to avoid in other major examples of movements generating or preparing the terrain for populist electoral victories and once in government, due to the unstable, tension-​filled, hybrid movement party form. Aside from Morales and the MAS, the South European examples of Syriza, Podemos, and the M5S in Italy are often pointed to as populist movement parties that grew out of movements (Podemos and M5S) or whose success was due to the social movements they latched onto (Syriza) helping them to achieve governmental power.130 In the latter case, where conflicts did emerge both within the party and with movements outside, the presence of overwhelming European pressure made the original projects of the populist government almost impossible. Syriza, formed in 2004 as a loose coalition of the leftist parliamentary party SYN, ecologists, and small extra-​parliamentary political groups of the left and radical left, is included by della Porta in her major study of movement parties against austerity.131 Yet she notes that despite its subsequent osmosis with anti-​ austerity movements and despite articulating key movement demands after becoming a more unified party in 2013, Syriza never allowed movement mentality to run through its organization.132 The party kept its federated, representative, hierarchical organizational structure, never turning to alternative forms of

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  77 participation (on line or off line), decision-​making, or movement style action-​ repertoires.133 Nor did it launch any civil society mobilizations itself or organize any protest events.134 Of all the hybrid parties, Syriza fits into the ideal type of movement party, and the populist model of governance, the least.135 Starting as a parliamentary party and familiar with institutions, proceedings, alliances, and contradictions, Syriza was never really an anti-​party party although it certainly challenged the corruption of the seemingly cartelized parties and party system that preceded its rise to power. Indeed Syriza developed an open alliance strategy with the movements (and unions) it related to and once in power acted as a responsible party dropping the anti-​establishment, friend–​enemy rhetoric and avoiding outbidding and all the other tactics that go with populism in power. In short, for whatever reasons, it dropped much of the populist posturing. In Spain, the party Podemos was launched in 2014 by a circle of intellectuals around Pablo Iglesias, a political scientist who became its secretary general, in the aftermath of the anti-​austerity Indignados movement of 2011–​2012 and influenced by its demands for real democracy and social justice.136 The populist character of Podemos is evident from its claim to speak for the people vs. the corrupt elite (borrowed from the Indignados), to be beyond left and right, and to embrace democratic forms that express the general will.137 It began both as a top-​ down and bottom-​up project emerging as a populist anti-​establishment movement party that presented itself as the alternative to the cartelized, two-​party regime of PSEO (the socialists) and PP (the center right Partido Popular) that it dubbed, “la Casta,” and that allegedly hijacked democracy and put Spain’s sovereignty and polity in the service of oligarchy.138 Podemos quickly became rooted in civil society by establishing 400 Circles (territorial and sectoral assemblies) open to participation and horizontally structured. Thus, as della Porta rightly notes, Podemos combined two elements: the leadership of Iglesias, thus plebiscitary linkages, and a huge process of citizen participation based on horizontal ties and self-​organization.139 The hybrid nature of this populist movement party generated tensions from the outset, expressed during its formative moment in an assembly in which two different organizational models confronted each other: a more conventional hierarchical party model vs. a more participatory one.140 The more traditional party model promoted by Iglesias was based on standard representative hierarchal structures with an executive, general secretary, and central committee and a winner takes all majority system. The movement-​oriented counter-​model promoted experimental horizontal structures using lots to allocate some positions of responsibility and a leading role for grassroots activist circles.141 The traditional model won in an online ballot, foregrounding the electoral project. Thus, Podemos consolidated more as a party and less as an activist movement. But it nonetheless retained many movement aspects combining a highly centralized

78  Populism and Civil Society networked structure with participatory rhetoric and (increasingly empty) participatory forms. Ultimately, this favored the personalization and plebiscitary trends typical of populist movement parties. Indeed here too as the party became successful, the circles linking civil society and social movements to the party internally were sidelined and the “participatory” instruments it developed, from open primaries to digital tools, engendered fragmentation and polarization. Insofar as the Iglesias faction seems to win always in the primaries and digital consultations, both have been criticized as not really competitive.142 As della Porta puts it: the intensive use of all these participatory tools does not preclude a plebiscitarian relationship between leaders and members.”143 What matters is “who defines the issues on which members are consulted.”144 Indeed. So far Podemos has managed to maintain its integrity, but in a coalition as a junior partner with the Socialist Party it was supposed to displace (its initial populist rhetoric against any such alliance as “cooptation” notwithstanding), and during the Covid 19 crisis, there has not yet been a real test of its ability to maintain its unity and a productive relationship with the movements that led to its rise. Even in this case, given the liberal democracy playing the role of a host ideology, almost a self-​contradiction for a populist organization, one would predict serious conflicts assuming that the movements survive or revive. If Podemos normalizes, then it will have to leave behind its populist anti-​establishment rhetoric and alter its movement party hybrid form even more. Again this does not preclude a productive relationship with the ideas (the anti-​austerity, anti-​ corruption, human rights defense, and defense of public services) or actors in movements in civil society, but it does require a re-​differentiation of party and movement and a more balanced movement party alliance relationship. It also requires abandonment of friend–​enemy rhetoric and affective polarization so that party competition can proceed along constructive lines. The Italian M5S is the most movementized populist anti-​party party to enter government on the European continent.145 As discussed in c­ hapter 1, the new media environment certainly is favorable to populist movement party success in mobilizing and gaining power, as the rise of that digital movement party in Italy witnesses. This was foreshadowed, to be sure, by the earlier success of the television party created by the media mogul, Berlusconi after the collapse of the old Italian party system.146 But Berlusconi and his party were hardly the first to make extensive use of television media, whereas the populist political entrepreneur Beppe Grillo is a self-​proclaimed originator in creating a new form of movement party: the digital platform party.147 As we have seen, populists claim to be radical democrats and to favor more direct democratic forms than representative democracy. Accordingly, the anti-​establishment, anti-​party stance can lead populists to idealize and mimic movement organizational logic. The M5S’s claim to be a “non-​party,” and even a “non-​association,” insofar as it is organized as a

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  79 digital platform modeled on social media such as Facebook, is a case in point.148 In 2009, Grillo announced the formation of a new type of electoral movement—​ the “5 Stars” (standing for environmental protection, public water, renewable energy, public transport, and sustainable development) and issued a “non-​statute” to indicate its difference from traditional parties. Referring to itself as a movement and in its first article as a non-​association, M5S’s headquarters are Grillo’s blog and the internet is its primary means of consultation.149 But it fits well the ideal type of a movement party that competes in elections and indeed, has succeeded in entering local regional and national parliaments. Yet it purports to fully realize direct democracy and to stick to horizontal participatory movement ideals, unlike traditional parties, thanks to its platform structure. Indeed the M5S presents as a digital platform, anti-​party party that purports to fully absorb the party into the movement form.150 Digital technology is constitutive of both the organizational structure (enabling mass decisional participation) and political ideology (egalitarian “unmediated” direct democracy) of platform parties.151 The project is to abolish the distinctions between movement and party, civil and political society, masses and elites. While all parties can use the new digital technology and media as additional means of communicating with voters, the entire life of the populist digital party M5S is purportedly rearranged around the digital media, modeled on the ways digital apps and social movements operate. The M5S has many of the movement features of other populist movement parties including low-​cost or free entry, lack of steady funding, and absence of hierarchical offices, intermediary cadre, etc.152 As a populist digital platform party the M5S boasts of dispensing entirely with the middleman (party bureaucracy, local militants, or the party on the ground) and instead conducts online referenda to involve “members” (those who click to sign onto the platform) in direct decision-​making, rejecting representation within the party (and implicitly in the state). In short the idea is to substitute all intermediation within the party with direct participation through digital media that supposedly allow direct democracy finally to replace rather than supplement representative or indirect versions.153 The form of direct democracy the M5S digital platform party embraces is thus the participatory one involving horizontal, egalitarian, individualized linkages, although here too there are undeniable contradictions and tensions between the plebiscitary linkages this structure fosters and its origin as a party created by a charismatic political entrepreneur who owns the blog and trademark, making it analogous to a firm franchise model.154 While the claim is that the M5S digital “nonparty’s” internal relation with members is one of abolishing mediation, decentralization, and direct democracy, as Gerbaudo shows, what occurs unavoidably is re-​introduction of mediations and re-​centralization.155 Power relations are “reintroduced” through centralization of its technical platform control in the hands of a new hierarchy

80  Populism and Civil Society of administrators and its owner, who together manage the platform and set the agenda.156 Thus while there is enormously widespread participation in the platform by individuals who voice their likes and dislikes of proposals, integrated control is maintained even while interfaces are distributed and dispersed, so that “distributed centralization” ensues.157 Moreover, the movement style membership rules (free registration, simple clicks, members are simply users of the blog, etc.) sever the relation between membership and financial contribution with the resulting disenfranchisement of the former. Free political labor fosters removal of mediations and undermines the building up of “the party on the ground” and of local experienced “cadres.” Centralization of control at the top is thus the counterpart of distributed and open access that empowers the leadership and ordinary members at the expense of cadres and militants thus creating a quintessential hollow party form. This gives the leadership significant advantage in directing and controlling the party (agenda setting) over members and contenders.158 The populist digital party dynamic stresses quantity of membership (the catch-​all feature) and process focused on the ethos of open participation and members’ experience of common involvement. It does not favor the pursuit of a program or specific polices that could keep the party together absent a charismatic leader and in the face of parliamentary successes and the inevitable responsibility and compromises that normally entails. In short, the populist digital party is a version of the hybrid movement party form. Its features of being a cloud party with virtual rather than physical presence, a forum party as a space of discussions involving dispersed widespread participation of members, sympathizers, and organizers, and open debates and live streamed political meetings are distinctive and new. But these are combined with plebiscitary linkages and hierarchical control of agenda setting by tech savvy party elites behind the scenes who run the platform and set the agenda and typically win in voting. It is questionable to say the least whether decision-​making in populist digital parties, M5S or others, actually entails higher quality democracy, the equal worth of every voice, radical decentralization, or the absence of intermediation. As we know, participation is not equivalent to democratization: the organizational framework predates the act of participation. Having done away with local branches, cadres, or what Katz and Mair call the party on the ground, the populist digital party gains widespread, click-​based, individualized participation at the price of serious, in-​depth, qualified debate, shifting the ability to speak in behalf of the movement from the base to the center and undermining the chance of challengers to party leadership to rise through the ranks. As Gerbaudo puts it, the virtualization and individualization of political participation and the absence of real voice and decision-​making power of local and intermediary party groups on the ground risks making the most committed militants feel superfluous, reducing their role to reactive plebiscitary mobilizations triggered from above.159

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  81 But it is also misleading to equate this to the realization of the movement form within the movement party. Movements entail, as Melucci pointed out long ago, an associational form, and what he called “latent associations” typically undergird the mass mobilizations and other visible, highly publicized forms of movement activity. The local face-​to face groups, associations, etc. and their contact with others are the real basis of civil society rooted social movement mobilization.160 The digital party “member” is more analogous to the individualized mobilized atomized actor of the mass society thesis than to autonomous horizontal social movement structures.161 As Gerbaudo’s study of digital parties shows, the hybrid populist digital party type enhanced the power of plebiscitary “hyper leaders” who claim to embody the movement and of those media savvy techies who set up the codes, direct the invisible organization’s strategies from behind the scenes, and frame the choices that the membership supposedly decides on.162 The much-​touted participation in digital populist parties is tantamount to a reactive base allied to a charismatic leader who with a small entourage has the power of initiative and deploys plebiscitary strategies.163 This is hardly the realization of deliberative democracy. Thus despite claims to be a non-​party, the populist hybrid digital platform movement party has all the tensions of its prototype. The point is not that digital social media perforce lead to plebiscitary forms of leadership democracy any more than other media forms. Indeed the use of such forms of communication, as in the case of print, radio, and TV, need not displace earlier forms (including face-​to-​face local gatherings) nor do they dictate an atomized, “movement” logic. Rather our point is that it is the populist logic, worldview, and rhetoric that is driving the digital movement party in the direction of pseudo-​democracy.164 The M5S digital party is the most unbalanced, compared with other movement parties, with respect to power relations that favor the leader and the level of personalization with weak counter-​trends despite its apparent total movementization.165 Populist logic also prevents such “nonparties” from abandoning their movement posturing once in parliament, generating tensions typical of the hybrid form of movement party around the requirements of a delegate system vs. direct democracy linked to anti-​party, anti-​ establishment rhetoric.166 Finally, the anti-​establishment, anti-​party stance and the embrace of movement logic undermines the party’s ability (and willingness) to be responsible and accountable for its actions once in power, so long as it remains populist, since it purports to be the opposition even when in and running the government. Last but hardly least is the complex case of the US Tea Party (TP) movement and the subsequent role of the populist political entrepreneur Donald Trump in taking over the Republican Party.167 An interesting mix of grass roots and “Astroturf ” mobilization led to the capture and movementization of

82  Populism and Civil Society an established party—​the Republican Party—​by right-​wing populism.168 To be sure the grassroots character of the TP has been contested, as the term Astroturf indicates.169 Skocpol and Williams themselves claim that “the Tea Party is neither a “top-​down creation nor a bottom-​up explosion.”170 They show that the TP indeed originated locally, building on activists and groups with local organizing experience. It is the important role of right-​wing advocacy and Washington, DC, based lobby organizations like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works that is inconsistent with the idea of a pure grassroots movement. What is certain is that the Republican Party as such played no role in a mobilization that was from the outset hostile to the established party, considering it little different from the demonized Democrats. Subsequently, Republican leaders more or less were forced to jump on this bandwagon, which both influenced and threatened them. Since the numerous local TP organizations never generated a federal structure of coordination, the national level lobby organizations using the same name came heavily under the influence of wealthy advocacy groups who were also linked to individual Republican politicians and candidates.171 To the extent there was integration and coordination of TP groups, it was these instances and, even more, the extensive right-​wing media, above all Fox News, that played this role. The energy initially came from below, while coordination emerged from a middle level and the money from outsiders. Skocpol and Williams show that there were many tensions and conflicts in the TP movement (and later among Trump supporters). The most important was between culturally conservative or traditionalist evangelicals and economic libertarians. On the local level the evangelicals seemed to dominate, while on the level of the advocacy groups the radical free market and libertarian orientations were more important. Perhaps even more potentially divisive was the attraction of some welfare state institutions for the grassroots participants: those supporting “deserving” clienteles who were able to pay into a system like Medicare and Social Security.172 These were in conflict with the views of the advocacy groups and leaders of the Republican Party who opposed any governmental social policy. The contradictions were papered over by either strained theological arguments for economic individualism or opposition to all taxation that was inconsistent for many grassroots activists who favored targeted welfare spending. Also noteworthy is the rural/​urban divide. Large sectors of white rural working class in de-​industrialized or otherwise struggling rural areas are not ideologically opposed to government regulation of corporations, nor to taxation in principle, nor are they committed to ultra-​free market ideology. Rather they feel overtaxed and oppose big government because they do not believe tax money goes back into their communities, but rather is channeled to the cities and to minorities, and that regulations are not written with their needs in mind.173 But key corporate and wealthy elite actors in and influencing the Republican Party in favor of TP

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  83 framing also endorse free trade and immigration and want to end entitlements like social security, disability insurance, and Medicare.174 There is also the divide between the Christian right who seek intrusive government regulation of the domain of intimacy and would gladly impose “Christian family values” on others vs. social political libertarians who oppose state interference in what they see as “private morals issues.”175 Within the Republican Party as an institution the conflict was over the degree of radicalism, and in this fight the Tea Partiers, supported especially by far-​right organizations, were victorious, using the method of running radical candidates in the electoral primaries. To be sure, the rightward shift of the Republican Party and its embrace of white Christian resentment predate the rise of the TP.176 And the success of the TP paved the way for Trump. Indeed Newt Gingrich’s tactics were a dress rehearsal insofar as he made use of populist anti-​establishment rhetoric to go rogue, preferring deadlock, absolute noncooperation, and blockage of the federal government (plus takeover through gerrymandering of local electoral districts) to negotiation and compromise with the Democratic Party in Congress or with the Obama presidency. It was the embrace of populist, anti-​ establishment rhetoric and anti-​immigrant, racist stances by Donald Trump that led to his capture of the party through the very savvy use of both new (tweets) and older (Fox news, reality show performance) media. This quintessential political outsider matched the radicalism of the TP and at times the extreme right organizations. Remarkably, he won (and governed) not by resolving the contradictions, but incorporating them in his person.177 He was an anti-​regulation, anti-​state, free-​market advocate who appealed to libertarians but who suggested nevertheless a kind of industrial policy based on “neo-​mercantilist” trade protectionism to help the losers of modernization. He was a libertine who did not practice a religion but supported all the social views of the religious right in the re-​inflamed culture wars, promising them sympathetic Supreme Court nominees. These very contradictions allowed him to achieve the support of the local TPs and the advocacy groups and more importantly, both the mobilized activists and the voters, a much wider group, along with the corporate rich. Considered in light of the economic crisis followed by a bailout targeting more the well off than middle-​and working-​class strata, and the status anxiety of large sections of the latter, the rise of the grassroots dimension of the TP can be explained on traditional grounds. Both types of grievances were exacerbated by the election (and some policies) of an African-​American president, who continued the bailout started by moderate Republicans. Given the internal contradictions of the movement, the electoral victories of both the TP and Trump in 2016 are more difficult to explain. Unification through personal charisma and trust directed at that person are hard to claim in the case of this particular candidate and leader, even if the excitement of relatively small groups of the

84  Populism and Civil Society mobilized can be demonstrated.178 To work both for the radicals and initially the more moderate voters something else was needed, and their common hostility to political parties benefitting an outsider was not enough. Trump’s victory and capture of the Republican Party was possible only in the context of the already hollowed out and failing Republican Party and in the new media environment. Clearly the capture of an old, established party like the US Republican Party by an outsider was first made possible by the hollowing out of the party generally (arguably it was already in crisis prior to Trump’s rise) and the TP’s rise that prepared the ground for the shift to the populist extreme right itself succeeding thanks the failure of the Republican establishment to speak to the needs of key constituencies. But, as argued in ­chapter 1, the polarization of cable news channels triggered by the explicitly right-​wing, pro-​Trump very-​well-​funded Fox news (responded to by MSNBC) and the new internet media environment played into the hands of Trump’s populist friend–​enemy logic by segmenting audiences, enabling the denigration of fact checking and denunciation of responsible journalism as fake news and allowing savvy media performance styles to replace serious discussion, analysis, informed critique, and commentary for targeted audiences. Obviously, the use of the internet fosters the personalism and plebiscitary populism figures like Trump prefer along with the weakening of fact-​based, truth-​oriented deliberative elements of party democracy. The movementization of the Republican Party and the asymmetric affective polarization it has embraced follow from the anti-​establishment, friend–​enemy, anti-​party, outsider stance and pars pro toto populist logic (white Christian America framed as the part that stands for the whole, i.e., the true American people and its values) Trump adopted as a candidate and perpetuated as president. Once in power, he succeeded in turning a still diverse party that included various fractions ranging from moderates to Tea Partiers, social libertarians to evangelicals, economic libertarians to more traditional “compassionate conservatives,” into a homogenized vehicle geared to his personal agenda. The Republican Party is now a populist movement party with the standard characteristics and tensions: unwillingness to drop their anti-​establishment rhetoric when in power; outbidding coupled with unwillingness to take responsibility for broken promises or failures; blaming “the deep state” and sets of scapegoats; demonization of the opposition in state, civil society, courts, and above all the other main political party; refusal to cooperate in Congress for the sake of good governance; and the embrace of pernicious affective polarization that frames the Democrats and their supporters as enemies of the true people whom Trump supposedly embodies. But Trump has also captured the movement that began the quest to capture the party: as witnessed by the lack of autonomy of the former (the TP is now defunct) and by the failure of Trump’s presidency to provide much in the way of policy to support the interests of its working-​class

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  85 supporters, apart from a few Supreme Court Justice appointees meant as sops to the Christian right and the rhetorical (racist, anti-​immigrant) dog whistles that speak to and increase status resentment while not dealing with its underlying causes.179 The direction that Trumpian populism, has taken the Republican Party, as evidenced by the happily unsuccessful but mostly unchallenged attempt by Republican politicians to deny the legitimacy of Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, is a sign that it has moved quite far away from being a good-​faith player in the democratic game of alternation. Whether the pernicious effects on party political competition and on the Republican Party itself can be reversed once Trump is gone remains to be seen. The choice facing this party is either to pursue populist Trumpism, remaining faithful to its base and to populist logic, becoming more akin to the populist party vehicles of Orbán, Kaczinski, Erdogan, and Modi, or instead choosing to shift gears, seeking to expand its support by normalizing and reaching out to once-​spurned sectors of the population and reinforcing democratic values.

Movement Parties and the Movementization of Parties The concept of movement party was developed to capture the specific links between the logic of movement and party, in a party form that emerged in the aftermath of the rise of the catch-​all party and the new social movements.180 Movement parties are a distinctive hybrid often involving “coalitions of political activists who emanate from social movements and try to apply the organizational and strategic practices of social movements in the arena of party competition.”181 They coalesce around salient issues and groups that remain unrepresented by the existing conventional political parties: omissions that enable their ambitious political entrepreneurs to enter the electoral arena. Like social movements, they lack extensive and intensive formal organizational structure (staff, offices, etc.) and have low-​cost, open membership. They tend not to develop an internal hierarchical structure of designated organs and officers with authority to make binding decisions and commitments on behalf of the party (no “party on the ground”).182 Nevertheless they are electoral actors competing in democratic elections and seeking political power. Importantly, movement parties can, but generally do not, originate in social protest movements. Kitschelt applies his conceptual analysis of the movement party form both to ecological parties that did emerge from such movements and to far-​right-​wing parties (including early populist ones) that did not. What matters in the movement party, as a hybrid form, is the adoption of movement logic, organizational models, and tactics while competing electorally. Some movement parties may be loyal to a charismatic leader, others may insist on “direct”

86  Populism and Civil Society participatory democracy.183 It is their lack of investment in problem solving (regarding collective action and social choice), their fluid organizational structure, the instability of collective decision-​making, and the informality and fluidity of membership alongside insistence in maintaining purist absolutist and oppositional stances that is key to most movement parties. In short, the movement party merges the logic of movements with the logic of parties, power, and influence, tendentially perverting both the representational and governing functions of parties and undercutting the self-​limiting and democracy expanding role of social movements. Kitschelt sees movement parties as transitional phenomena precisely due to their contradictory hybrid features that combine movement and party logics in ways that render them unstable. At work here is not Michels’ iron law, whereby self-​interested party leaders allegedly abandon the interests of their principles.184 Rather it is the logic of effective inter-​party competition and the demands of governing responsibly (the exercise of public power) in liberal and pluralist constitutional democracies that push movement parties either to transition into more standard party forms, to decline, or to devolve back into social movements. Kitschelt describes a range of institutional incentives and contextual conditions that may induce politicians in movement parties to move away from the profile regarding organizational structure, fundamentalist positions, and anti-​ establishment, anti-​party stances. But he does not foresee the movement party becoming a hegemonic or dominant form in constitutional democracies, and apparently assumes that if one succeeds in acquiring a legislative majority and control over government, it could hardly resist the pressures to turn into a more ordinary political party. The other prominent form of movementization of parties is via “alliance”—​by virtue of which a movement becomes a fraction within an established party and uses its influence inside the party to push its agenda. This has been the dominant version in the United States in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Social movements can become “anchoring groups” within a political party, reshaping its long-​ term trajectories in ideological and policy development.185 “Anchoring groups” are organized actors that forego autonomous action to ally with major political parties and exercise broad influence on national politics by virtue of the money, voters, and networks they offer to the party with which they have allied.186 When parties are strong, (i.e., not hollow) the party leaders and pragmatists are able to remain the gatekeepers, and although they lose some autonomy vis-​à-​vis the new fraction, the anchoring movement gives up much more autonomy, insofar as it must de-​radicalize and shed its more fundamentalist adherents and ideological purism, forgoing autonomous action, and in short, renouncing “the best” in favor of the good.187 This version of alliance and incorporation, accordingly, elevates group moderates permitting the party to continue to appeal to

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  87 the median voter over time. The party thereby gains important resources (time, money, access to networks) and votes, while movements get substantive results aligned with their norms and ideologies.188 The incorporation of movements into a party as an anchoring group can lead to major realignments and major transformations of the orientation and development of political parties. This can strengthen the democratic competitive party system by ensuring that new needs, interests, and groups are addressed and included in party political representation. The classic example is the labor movement and the Democratic Party alliance forged during the New Deal.189 Alliances with movements that penetrate a party can, however, in the case of hollow, catch-​all parties, and populist movement pressures, help to further hollow them out, and morph into party capture, especially if movement fractions push through institutional reforms inside the party that allow them to retain their movement features. Rising movements typically generate counter-​ movements that in turn might seek to ally with a different party. This is allegedly what happened in the United States, in the aftermath of the rise of the civil rights movement, its embrace by President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Party, and the white backlash generated in the South triggering presidential challenges mounted by populists like Wallace in 1964 and 1968, and then Nixon’s and Reagan’s infamous successful Southern strategy. The result was a general party realignment that turned the South Republican and led to more clearly sorted political parties.190 But the realignment that the counter-​ movement of racist, populist fundamentalists triggered in response to the civil rights movement’s embrace by the Democratic Party had other effects. The movement–​ counter-​ movement dynamic created centrifugal pressures, apparently leading the parties to reassess the strategy of appealing to the median voter.191 With respect to the Democrats, the internal transformation of the party in the context of the antiwar movement, led to a “silent revolution” that took place between 1968 and 1972.192 In an effort to democratize the nomination process for political candidates, to get away from the smoky back room deals and to strip state party elites of their control over delegate selection to presidential nominating conventions, activists involved in the McGovern-​Fraser reform project for the Democratic Party succeeded in creating the new primary (or caucus) system. They did so by invoking “the people” writ large,” yet hoping to create a strong, active, institutionalized party that might render parties more inclusive and responsive to the citizenry while avoiding Michel’s iron law.193 The Republicans followed suit. The unintended consequences of these reforms apparently was the empowerment of radical minorities in the movement wings of both parties, which laid the groundwork for extremist polarization and the shift of party orientation and appeals away from the median voter in favor of “playing to the base.”194 For political equality may be eviscerated when radicals take over

88  Populism and Civil Society the primaries (low general turnout for primaries and high turnout of extremists being typical) and push the parties to embrace ever more extreme positions not supported by most of their constituents.195 However as Meyer and Tarrow rightly argue, the Democratic Party remained a decentralized coalition of interest groups that limited its movementization, while the Republicans became both more centralized and increasingly vulnerable to its base and its Astroturf enablers to the extent to which it embraced an eclectic mix of racist, white nationalist, Christian fundamentalist, and anti-​ regulatory, anti-​tax, anti-​government, pro-​business, and libertarian ideology.196 This opened the door for populist groups like the TP rebels and later Donald Trump to take over and capture the party: something that was blocked by the more diverse and decentralized nature of the Democratic Party.197 This furthered the hollowing out of the Republican Party as establishment elites and state parties lost control over delegate selection, local and state level party organizations atrophied, movement activists inside and outside the party became dominant, and other outsiders alien to the concerns of activists, including funding sources, think tanks, super PACs, talk show hosts, and new interactive media actors, disorganized the space parties once occupied and replaced the party organization as the key actors generating electoral candidates.198 But it is also true that on economic issues, the establishment parties in the United States and Europe had moved to the center right since the mid-​1980s (the cartel thesis) embracing neo-​liberal austerity politics in place of the older great society new deal welfare state politics of an earlier epoch. We argue that it is a mistake to define democratization via primaries or other mechanisms as tantamount to the hollowing out of parties or their movementization. Instead it can be a way to revitalize parties by making them more inclusive, so long as the new fractions accept internal plurality and are willing to de-​radicalize in appropriate ways.199 Movementization of parties linked to populism, however, is distinctive in that it cannot follow that path for reasons we shall specify later. It is thus highly questionable whether the populist demand of “letting the people decide” by means of binding primaries and caucuses is really tantamount to democratization. The hollowing out of catch-​all parties and their convergence politics constitutes the political opportunity structure for populist emergence and success: be it via the capture of an existing political party (as in the United States in the case of the Republican Party) or by forming new populist movement parties (as in Europe). The current populist wave did not create the hollowing out of parties or their movementization.200 But it is our thesis that contemporary populist parties are movement parties in the structural sense, regardless of how they arose, and that they and their leaders both exacerbate these trends and are incapable of avoiding or tempering them even when they participate in government or are in power.

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  89 To see why, we have to return to our analysis of how populist logic impacts parties and party system dynamics. Indeed the emergence of a distinctive populist type of anti-​party, catch-​all movement party risks triggering a transformation of the overall party system that heralds a deformation rather than a democratization of democratic politics in constitutional democracies.201

Populist Logic: Implications for Populist Parties and Democratic Party Systems For the purposes of this chapter we stress elements of the populist political worldview that orient populist political organizations.202 As already indicated, these involve: (1) a Manichean, political worldview that identifies Good with the will of the sovereign people and Evil with conspiring elites and their allies; (2) a pars pro toto logic that extracts the true people, the authentic majority, the “real” sovereign, from the rest of the population and casts its representative(s) as their embodiment; (3) a friend–​enemy conception of politics; and (4) an anti-​ establishment stance that cannot be abandoned even when a populist party is in government. While left and right populisms can be distinguished by the host ideologies they embrace and the policies they enact, it is the worldview that they share as populists that dictates the anti-​party party form of populist political organization and the logic of their politics both in and out of power. There are four specific dynamics that populism unleashes with regard to political organization. What we can call, following Sartori, the re-​factionalization of political parties follows from the pars pro toto logic; the friend–​enemy (and Manichean) conception of politics fosters a new form of severe polarization; the anti-​establishment stance turns populist parties into a distinctive type of anti-​ party, anti-​system, catch-​all movement party and fosters the movementization of populist parties generally; and finally once in government, the anti–​status quo orientation of populist parties goes with their willingness eviscerate democratic norms, constitutionalist principles, the rule of law, and minority rights if these are deemed antithetical to the requirements of representing the will of the sovereign people. We will briefly address the first three dynamics here and turn to the fourth in c­ hapter 3. However, it should be clear that we are speaking of a logic inherent in populist parties that follows from all four dimensions taken together. The logic of populist parties is anti-​party despite the obvious fact that they are parties competing to win elections, because the claim of a part to be the whole militates against party pluralism. That, together with the moralizing Manichean worldview and friend–​enemy dynamics, involves the uncompromising posture of a movement that sees itself as above all other parties insofar as it embodies the sovereignty and will of the real people. Parties are partial and plural in a

90  Populism and Civil Society party system, but on populist logic such partiality and pluralism cannot apply to a populist party insofar as it stands for the whole: it is in this sense that populist parties are anti-​party parties whether or not they claim to be so. Indeed the anti-​establishment stance of populist movement parties allows them to portray competitors as the enemy, as part of the corrupt establishment with whom, as per the purist logic of movements, compromise is out of the question. To be sure, a populist party can for strategic, pragmatic, and contextual reasons (depending on the electoral system among other factors) enter into coalitions with other parties and make compromises, but these empirical phenomena do not belie but rather may temporarily mitigate the populist logic. Insofar as a movement party remains populist, however, its logic and dynamic militates against such “normalization.”

The Pars Pro Toto Logic and the Relapse into Factionalism Party competition and party government in a functioning democracy entail acceptance of plurality, dissent, alternation, and the legitimacy of the opposition. Parties shape and channel conflict into competition, regulate rivalry, and acknowledge their partisanship and partiality such that it is evident that no party speaks for the whole even as it articulates a vision for the whole along with the interests of its constituents.203 Parties in a democratic system thus accept that their exercise of power is provisional as is the status of the opposition pending the next election.204 Put differently, partisans and partisanship are part and parcel of party democracy, as is the discipline of conceding each party’s status as just one part in a permanently pluralist politics.205 At issue is a political democratic ethics: willingness to compromise (accept the good at the expense of the best), a disposition to tolerate or welcome diversity in order to be in the majority, respect for minority rights, political pluralism, and a certain comprehensiveness so that a party in power can claim to have earned the approval of “the great body of the people.”206 The latter sentiment involves what Rosenblum calls “shadow holism.” By this she means that winning a procedural majority entails the authority to govern and represent the whole, imparting a certain “moral force” to the party in power, all things being equal.207 Holism, a philosophical political stance that rejects social division, and holist anti-​party-​ism, one of its political manifestations, is typically neither democratic nor republican, for their common feature of majority rule implies a plurality of legitimate views, interests, and opinions and a thus political opposition and political minority (with rights).208 Thus democratic majoritarianism entails a “shadow holism” that involves bowing to the decisions of the numerical majority as if it were the decision of the whole, with certain

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  91 provisos. First, majoritarianism is not unmitigated: it is typically constrained in scope and by substantive limitations on what matters the ruling majority may decide. Second, the majority is accepted as the authority deciding for the whole, provisionally and for a limited period. The majority accordingly acts as if it were the whole, decides for the whole, while recognizing that it is a part (as are the minority or a plurality of political minorities) and thus that its “as if ” status as a stand-​in for the whole is provisional and for a determined period.209 “This is only a shadow of holism because majority and minority are conceived as parts of, not parts against, this whole.”210 This conception of majority rule thus involves, “a semblance of mutual respect, minimal concern for the interests and opinions of others, provisional-​ism, and resolving disputes through argument.”211 As Sartori aptly puts it: “If a party is a part, it follows that the whole cannot be represented or constituted by just one party, although it does not follow from this that each party should behave as part for itself, as a part unrelated to the whole.”212 Parties, in a democratic pluralist party system, articulate the interests of their constituents and members but also promote the public welfare typically articulated in a party program oriented by some principle or vision of what that public good entails.213 Accordingly parties (and the party system) can be deformed in two ways: excessive partisanship—​i.e., a relapse into factionalism in which the parts overwhelm the whole—​or unitarism (Sartori) or better put, “holism” in Rosenblum’s language, in which one party claims to embody the whole such that the whole is purportedly represented or constituted by that party whose will coincides with the will of the people.214 The former turns dissent into fundamental conflict the latter turns consent into enforced homogeneity. Populist parties do both. Sartori was thus well aware that parties could degenerate into factions in a democracy if the party system fails to orient their behavior by channeling their actions (if not their motivations) beyond serving crude self-​interest so they function to deliver collective benefits to the general population. He draws Madison’s well-​known and succinct definition: By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and activated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.215

For Sartori, if parties do not act as partisan parts (accepting the legitimacy of other parts, other parties) governing also for the sake of the whole, then degeneration of the party system into self-​serving factions is likely.216 Recently several theorists have applied this insight to the analysis of populist parties, drawing on the path-​breaking work of Norberto Bobbio as well as

92  Populism and Civil Society that of Sartori.217 Bobbio was one of the first to assess the logic of populist anti-​ party parties in terms of the concept of faction, along with its impact on the party system once they enter into government, drawing on the example of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia.218 His factionalism argument regarding populist anti-​party parties has two aspects to it. First, according to Bobbio, populist anti-​party parties in power are factions in the classic sense insofar as they put particularistic interests above those of the whole, blur the distinctions between government and state and public and private, and thus foster a kind of contemporary patrimonialism in which the public resources of the state and its institutions are privatized or perverted to benefit of party members, supporters, and personalistic leader. This kind of factionalism is thus a form of corruption that populist parties have a proclivity toward, although it is hardly unique to them. The second element in the factionalism argument draws on and refines the part/​whole analysis.219 As we have argued, the populist anti-​party party rests on a pars pro toto logic: presenting itself as the only legitimate spokesmen for (and its leader as the embodiment of) the authentic, sovereign people, the “real majority,” that it extracts from the rest of the population and opposes to the elites. As a strategy the aim is to create a unified “collective subject”—​“the people”—​ with a collective will, by erecting a chain of equivalences among heterogeneous demands around a “hegemonic signifier” articulated by a leader with whom the people identify.220 This entails constructing a frontier between “us” and “them,” but the “them” is never only the establishment—​it invariably includes the parts of the population unallied with the populist party movement who may be stigmatized as elites or outsiders or as undeserving populations coddled by elites. Thus the pars pro toto stance is a rhetorical device that presents a part as the whole, the only true people, and by acting as if it were the whole, produces a faction in the original sense. The “toto” part is ideological; the factionalization of the party in question, and potentially of the entire party system, is the likely result. Factionalism and holism are thus connected. The Manichean worldview and pars pro toto logic of populist anti-​party party mobilization thus leads to an oxymoron: “democratic holism.” Populism turns “shadow holism” into a version of factionalism based on the misleading claim that having won a procedural majority, the winning party represents and speaks for everyone, including the opposing minority. But the authentic people are never the whole of the citizenry, it is always a part (and is internally merely an aggregate not a substantive unity) that purports to be the true whole, based on exclusions and a deep seated monism, thus subverting the political plurality that is the real basis of democratic party systems. “Democratic holism” thus follows from populism’s worldview and logic but is a distortion of the political pluralism and of the principle of majoritarianism. Indeed it subtly delegitimizes the losing political minority, the opposition in civil and political society, and silences

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  93 individuals who did not vote for and don’t endorse the majority’s program, denying them a moral claim or stance, simultaneously denuding party pluralism of its legitimacy. Populist “democratic holism” construes the division of democracy into parties as anathema, implying that only one party really incarnates popular sovereignty as the will of the only authentic part of the population: the people. The populist anti-​party party purports to stand for and represent the whole. But, as Kelsen pointed out nearly a century ago, the claim of a party winning a majority to represent and speak for the whole people is misleading and does not follow from the right and the authority to rule that a valid procedural majority vote confers on the party winning an election.221

The Friend–​Enemy Political Logic and Affective Polarization The friend–​enemy conception of politics inherent in populism connects with its “democratic holism,” insofar as adversaries are not considered part of the true people, and also furthers the factionalization of parties and party systems—​the party as part pretending to be the whole although it is after all only a part. But equally if not more important is that populist friend–​enemy politics contribute to a form of extreme political polarization, which threatens the democratic principles that make disagreement, dissent, and pluralism within an inclusive polity constructive instead of destructive. As Sartori aptly put it, “Dissent draws from both consensus and conflict but coincides with neither.”222 He also observed that “The non-​party party denies, instead the very principle of diversity and institutionalizes the repression of dissent.”223 To be sure, he had in mind ideological anti-​system parties of the far left (communists) and the far right (fascists) that purported to speak for the whole, whether construed as the working class or the ethnic-​nation. With these in mind he developed his theory of extreme polarized pluralism that distorts and perverts democratic, party systems. For us today, the question is what is distinctive about the polarization produced by populist anti-​party catch-​all movement parties that claim to embrace democracy and how they function nonetheless, to undermine democratic, party systems. Sartori developed the classic theory of extreme polarized pluralism as a specific subtype of modern, democratic, party systems that, while able to produce stability under certain conditions, distorts party political competition and political representation. This is contrasted with his normative account of moderate pluralism and well-​functioning, democratic, party systems that have up to five parties and follow a bi-​polar logic of government/​legitimate opposition and alternation.224 Polarization is analyzed in terms of ideological distance between parties and candidates. Extreme polarized pluralism entails the presence of one or more anti-​system parties at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum and a

94  Populism and Civil Society party occupying the center of the political space. The anti-​system party is a party whose ideology is “extraneous,” i.e., does not share the values of the political order within which it operates. Thus an anti-​system party undermines the legitimacy of the regime it explicitly opposes, eviscerates its base of support, and seeks to change not only the government but also the entire system of government. Its opposition then is not an opposition on issues but an opposition of principle.225 Extreme polarized pluralism ensues when there are bilateral, mutually exclusive counter-​oppositions of the anti-​system party type that cannot join forces. The center, occupied by a centrist party or coalition, excludes alternation in power with the anti-​system parties on both flanks. In this sense the system is multi-​ polar insofar as it hinges on a center facing both a left and a right.226 The dynamics of this form of extreme polarized pluralism are centrifugal and conducive to immoderate extremist and polarized politics (great ideological distance), fostering irresponsible oppositions and a tendency toward a politics of outbidding and over-​promising. The anti-​system party may even participate in elections and enter into government, but its participation is characterized by negative integration.227 Sartori notes that such a system can be quite stable, as witnessed by Italy after WWII until the 1980s, given the stability of voter preferences and the ability of parties to encapsulate voters’ loyalties but that it is nonetheless deeply dysfunctional in other ways and undermines democratic norms. Certainly contemporary populist party politics differ in important ways from this version of extreme polarized pluralism: populist catch-​all movement parties are not strongly ideological parties comparable to communists or fascists, instead they are flexible and eclectic regarding the host ideologies they latch onto; they present themselves as anti-​party parties not as anti-​system parties; and instead of calling for the abolition of the entire system of government they claim to be committed to refounding and thus improving the democratic regimes in which they emerge. It is our thesis nevertheless that the friend–​enemy orientation of populist parties (together with their pars pro toto logic and anti-​ establishment rhetoric) fosters a distinctive form of pernicious polarization and a party form and orientation—​the anti-​party party—​that, like the older explicit anti-​system parties, undermine the legitimacy of the democratic system in which they participate. Looking at the Italian example, as Tronconi noted in the case of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party’s striking success from 1994 to 1995 when it entered government, and again in 2001–​2006 when it became an early European instance of contemporary populist government (when it obtained all the cabinet ministries and turned into the longest serving cabinet in Italian history), a distinctive type of polarization ensued that restructured political competition to revolve around the cleavage: pro–​anti Berlusconi.228 This version does not entail a center party facing two anti-​system parties divided by great ideological distance but rather an anti-​party party deploying populist friend–​enemy logic, developed

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  95 in reaction to the apparent cartelization of the party system and the collapse of the old ideological parties on the right and especially on the left. Berlusconi engaged in friend–​enemy populist rhetoric linked to an eclectic innovative set of ideological positions (in conjunction with his main competitor, Bossi of the Lega Norde) to help construct the relevant social identity and identifications that could coalesce into sufficient support to allow his populist party to win power.229 The dynamic of populist party politics in power created a bi-​polar type of political polarization in which no center can hold, unlike in the Sartori model.230 Some argue that Sartori’s concept of anti-​system party and his conception of extreme polarization applies to populist anti-​party parties and to populism in power, citing the case of Chavez’s Venezuela.231 Certainly the socialism Chavez latched onto as a host ideology, and developed into a left populism, and his anti-​ colonial rhetoric, helped him succeed in mobilizing a counter-​reaction to the oligarchical and seemingly cartelized old party system in Venezuela by challenging its exclusions and corruption. We need not decide here whether socialism was the host ideology or the core of the populism he embraced and entrenched in government and society. The question is whether populist parties and politics generally involve a form of severe political polarization distinct from the version Sartori analyzed. We think that it does. In many contexts populist anti-​party parties pride themselves as being beyond the old left/​right divisions, while challenging the consensus-​and center-​oriented establishment “cartel” parties in power and the defunct classic right and left (socialist/​communist) ideological parties that flanked them on either side. Yet they can lead to a new, realigned set of left/​right leaning populist party political polarization counter-​posed to a new center, although one that is very unstable indeed.232 Recently political scientists have sought to refine the concept of polarization to get at what Sartori’s model apparently screens out.233 Some, drawing on the social psychology literature on group dynamics and social identity formation, have developed the concept of “affective political polarization” as an alternative to the Sartori model.234 Accordingly, affective political polarization is based not on ideology but on social identity and identification driven by partisanship. The sorting of people into opposed political camps (partisan sorting) around one overarching cleavage that extends into the societal sphere involving stacked identity elements (race, religion, region, ethnicity, etc.) penetrating into everyday life of socializing, schools, churches, residential communities, and families such that exclusion and segregation from the opposite camp follows, is characteristic of affective polarization.235 Affective political polarization entails feelings of dislike, animosity, hostility and lack of trust toward the opposed party(ies) and supporters who are deemed hypocritical, closed minded, selfish, and dangerous.236 The concept of social distance plays a key role here insofar as affective polarization entails the avoidance of social interaction with out-​group members.

96  Populism and Civil Society Preexisting social cleavages can but need not be the basis of extreme affective political polarization, and their existence is insufficient to predict extreme polarization.237 Certainly ideology and ideological sorting can still be at work here, but the point is that identity politics play the key role in affective partisan polarization. In order to clarify what is distinctive and destructive (to democratic party systems) about this form of political polarization it is worth noting that genuine and even deep disagreements and/​or social segmentation do not in themselves lead to extreme or affective partisan polarization. Nor does coherent ideological sorting of parties, such that “conservatives” and “liberals” are each confined to different parties, necessarily entail extreme polarization ideologically or affectively: indeed, the two camps may be no farther apart on substantive policy issues then prior to such sorting, and each may be willing to cooperate with the other side for the sake of good governance.238 Moreover, strategic incitement of ideological differences or polemical critiques of a ruling party or parties by outsider political entrepreneurs or new political parties seeking to mobilize support by articulating unrepresented demands may be reflective of genuine divisions without culminating in factionalism or severe affective polarization. But strategic incitement of affective partisan polarization is on the rise and it has led analysts to view polarization generally as an interactive, relational, and political process rather than, in the mode of opinion surveys or social psychology, as a snapshot of people’s natural in-​group/​out-​group feelings or opinions. Here we concur with recent works that focus on populist incitement of severe affective polarization.239 These argue that identity-​based “affective” polarization is interactive, relational, and involves a political process, led today by populist political entrepreneurs using discourses designed to generate, deepen, amplify, and exploit sociopolitical cleavages and resentments. They define polarization as a process whereby the normal multiplicity of differences in a society increasingly align along a single dimension, cross-​cutting differences become reinforcing, and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of “us” versus “them.”240 Accordingly polarization is a discourse driven process, exaggerating differences between groups to activate exclusive identity markers and alignments. The relevant rhetoric and signals by populist political entrepreneurs and activists aim precisely at fostering the construction of sociopolitical relations in which opposed, comprehensive, exclusionary, and mutually hostile identities and identifications are established.241 Valence issues in which one party is accused of incompetence or corruption get linked to political/​social identities such that parties, their members, and their voters are “othered”—​excluded from the acceptable range of social differences.242 Typically the populist inspired version of affective polarization is wed to the politics of resentment (the affective dimension), which involves blaming someone (elites and the groups they support) on

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  97 the other side of the political frontier rather than something (economic, cultural, social change, and public policies) for particular grievances—​exacerbating the us vs. them dynamic.243 Accordingly, contemporary populism fosters a widespread subtype of polarizing politics that (over-​)simplifies politics by aligning cross-​cutting differences along the generalized “elites” and their supporters vs. “the people” distinction. Some democratic theorists want to avoid the concept of “affective polarization” preferring the term “other-​regarding polarization” as a conceptual substitute, because the former risks focusing too much on feelings of dislike or hatred among polarized groups, implying that in the absence of such politically manipulated polarization, somehow we must all like one another.244 Accordingly, the focus instead should be on the effect of identity-​based (“other-​regarding”) partisan polarization on democratic norms. These norms require tolerance of difference and acceptance that others may express or act according to their beliefs in tune with their identities, not that we like one another. Indeed, anger at those who have discriminated against a particular group is not necessarily destructive of democratic norms and could trigger action against injustice and in favor of inclusive social change that can be democracy reinforcing.245 What matters with respect to democratic norms and functioning is not how people feel about one another per se but how they speak and interact with those with whom they disagree.246 The idea is that we should shift attention from the affective dimension of polarization to the principles that people may violate when distancing themselves from their political opponents, when they reject their shared identity as fellow citizens, in the joint enterprise of democracy.247 But the concept of affective political polarization is part of the object language of political science and a useful indicator of the dynamics of polarization specific to populist politics. The issue of affect remains important insofar as it can be manipulated to feed the politics of resentment and to deepen social segmentation and pernicious divisiveness so central to populist party dynamics. Moreover, the effect of severe identity-​based, relational political polarization on democracy in its contemporary populist version is precisely the focus of the work of McCoy, Somer, and colleagues, their continued reference to the affective dimension and use of the term affective polarization notwithstanding.248 Indeed as they note, due to the successful efforts of populists in many democracies around the globe, we increasingly are in a situation in which people only associate, communicate, interact, and read or listen to the media linked to their own side of a bi-​polar political frontier, deeming the other side to be hostile, contemptuous, untrustworthy, fooled, and/​or corrupt enemies. They stress the political and relational nature of populist polarization and the way it constructs social rather than ideological distance. The affective dimension of this form of polarization entails hostility and undermines democratic norms. Thus we think it makes sense to think

98  Populism and Civil Society of extreme ideological and severe affective polarization as ideal types, the elements of which can overlap in practice.249 It is not hard to pinpoint the specific logic and commitments inherent in populism that foster severe affective political polarization and that make it pernicious for democratic, party systems. That populist politics are perforce identity politics follows from their worldview and logic.250 The friend–​enemy conception of the political, the Manichean worldview, its pars pro toto stance, and its strategic logic leads populist political entrepreneurs and activists to use polarizing political rhetoric and to intentionally trigger severe affective polarization (sympathy toward in-​group and antipathy toward the out-​group).251 Political systems in which populist parties become powerful and enter into government have a strong tendency to alter party political competition such that it becomes polarized in an us vs. them way, based less on strong ideologies or programmatic commitments and more on exclusive political identities and antagonistic social relations constructed through and strongly inflected by friend–​enemy conceptions.252 Populist parties’ strategic goal, as already indicated, is to attain and maintain political power electorally, based on mobilization of heterogeneous strata around a constructed, unitary political identity and leader. The strategy, clearly stated by Laclau and instantiated in every contemporary case of populist party politics and governments, is to erect chains of equivalence across various grievances (“demands”) by stacking the particular group identities of those to be included in the empty signifier, “the people,” under a single overarching partisan political identity. This partisan political identity is relational in that it is based on the construction, as Laclau puts it, of a frontier on the other side of which there is the opposed identity: “the elite” or “the establishment,” its enablers, and those coddled by them, deemed as not part of the authentic people but as their antagonist/​enemy.253 Polarization between the two party-​political/​social identities is thus intended by populist “reason” and strategic logic to be severe and affective.254 Certainly populists latch onto host ideologies, which albeit eclectic, can be described generally as left or right: hence the terms left and right populism, the former usually associated with some version of a socialist agenda, the latter with some version of exclusionary nationalism, although these can also overlap. But the logic of affective polarization flows from the political and relational dynamics of populism, not from the host ideologies or political programs populists latch onto, although here too these can become tightly linked. Indeed, populism thrives by strengthening tribal tendencies of in-​group loyalty and out-​group resentment and conflict by latching onto whatever contextual ideology will render divisions and differences between the camps salient, presenting political competition as a zero-​sum, winner take all, game and framing opposing political projects as an existential threat to the sovereignty and welfare of the authentic people. In short,

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  99 populist strategy involves a type of identity politics that plays on affect, fosters strong cathected political identifications, deeply segmented and stacked political identities, and personalizes disagreement, making it hard to discuss or work across frontiers. It is also not hard to show that populist identity-​based affective polarization has pernicious effects on democratic party systems and democratic norms. Every political party in a democracy aggregates interests and opinions and seeks identification with its projects by a majority and label. It should be noted that from a democratic normative standpoint, ideological and/​or policy-​regarding polarization are not ipso facto democracy eviscerating. Democracy entails the right to dissent and to openly disagree and challenge public policies on the basis of one’s preferences, opinions, or ideological commitments.255 In an open society and democratic polity, the level of ideological and policy disagreement should reflect people’s free choices and a free process of opinion formation.256 No democratic norm is violated by the public expression of deep ideological disagreement or dissent regarding public policy, although deep disagreement and deeply divided societies may make political cooperation and compromise harder. But as Rostboll correctly notes, the counterpart to the right to disagree, dissent from, and even polarize on the first level of policy preferences is the obligation to respect the other as a fellow participant on the second level and thus to treat opponents as sharing a civic identity with oneself—​that of being a co-​participant in a democracy.257 Populist friend–​enemy dynamics have precisely the effect of undermining respect for the civic standing of those on the other side of the frontier, construing them as not part of “the people” and their party political representatives as ultimately an illegitimate opposition. This clearly violates the democratic obligation to interact with opposing political parties and their supporters as fellow participants in a democratic self-​government. Insofar as populist parties and governments typically present the political project and policies of the other party(ies) as an existential threat, adopt Manichean rhetoric describing party political competition in cosmic terms of a struggle between good and evil, and denigrate their opponents’ socio-​political identity as perforce not part of the authentic people but as an internal enemy, the polarization they foster has exclusionary effects no matter how inclusive it is toward those on its side of the us vs. them divide. The discourse of inclusive left populism does not escape this dynamic, for it includes those formerly excluded or without voice by excluding others whom they label elites or their supporters.258 Severe affective polarization fostered by populist partisanship has distinct distorting effects on democratic, party systems comparable to those of extreme polarization described by Sartori, albeit for different reasons. It fosters out-​ bidding and over-​promising on the part of populist parties and refusal to take

100  Populism and Civil Society responsibility for power and policies even when the party is in or is “the” government. Out-​bidding and over-​promising go hand in hand with the redemptive orientation of populist conceptions of democracy.259 The refusal to take responsibility for failure to deliver on promises once in power follows from its friend–​ enemy polarizing logic that always finds hidden enemies and, as we will see, from its anti-​establishment stance that allows populists in government to blame the deep state or the machinations of the other party for failures. Instead of taking responsibility for failure to follow through on promises, populist parties in power deny the facts, invoke fake news, and bemoan the hostility of the traditional media allegedly serving the opposition. This undermines the basic rules of political competition in democratic elections because accountability is central to well-​functioning, democratic party dynamics, as Sartori rightly argued.260 Accordingly, competitive politics is based on a minimum of fair competition and mutual trust. But if a party can promise “heaven on earth” without having to respond to what it promises, this falls below standards of fair competition, and the political game is played in terms of unfair competition characterized by incessant escalation. Such a stance skews party competition and may easily trigger escalation of promising and outbidding by the opposition parties seeking to unseat a populist government, further distorting party system dynamics and undermining the possibility of responsible government.261 Sartori refers to these effects of extreme polarization as an “inflationary disequilibrium.”262 While he had in mind the version of extreme polarization in which the anti-​system parties on the right and left had no chance to acquire power, as the center was occupied, the logic also applies to affective identity-​based polarization fomented by populist parties even when they are in power, insofar as they refuse responsibility and resist accountability for the results of their governance.

The Anti-​Establishment Stance and the Permanent Movementization of Anti-​Party Parties A similar dynamic follows from the anti-​establishment stance of populist parties. That stance, together with their anti-​party posture, reinforces the tendency of populist parties to render their movementization permanent.263 As we noted earlier, Kitschelt postulated that movement parties are hybrids that combine contradictory movement and party logics rendering them unstable, transitional political forms. He assumed that the dynamics of interparty competition and the demands of governing in democratic party systems would lead movement parties to either devolve into movements or become ordinary political parties dropping their movement structures and posturing. Put differently, he argued that the dynamics of party competition and governance in a constitutional

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  101 democracy would tame movement parties, leading them to differentiate their movement and party logics and to participate in political competition and governance in productive, responsible ways.264 But populist anti-​establishment logic and overall worldview prevent normalization. Even when successful in mobilizing and coming to power, populist parties retain their anti-​party movement stance, reinforce their hybrid character, and tend to transform the dynamics of party competition accordingly—​fostering outbidding, irresponsibility, lack of cooperation, and rejection of compromise—​ undermining responsible party competition and government, instead of being transformed by its requirements. Their anti-​establishment posture sows distrust of other parties, institutionalized counter-​powers, and independent state institutions generally (independent judicial and administrative agencies, established professional credentialed media, etc.).265 Their anti-​party discourse generates hostility toward other “traditional” party organizational forms and leads them to exaggerate their movement postures and rhetoric. Indeed, populist parties capitalize on and exacerbate the trends toward hollowing out and movementization insofar as they reject the differentiation between movement (exercising influence) and party (acquiring and exercising power) logics. This perverts the functioning of both movements and parties undermining their democracy enhancing and/​or stabilizing dynamics. The populist movement party’s logic is monist to the extent it purports to be the sole embodiment of the authentic people, their only true voice, such that it cannot accept either real autonomy for the movement side of the hybrid within or the legitimacy of other parties without. It is worth reemphasizing that at issue is not the genesis but the structural logic of populist anti-​party parties. A populist anti-​establishment party can emerge “from above” through the political entrepreneurship of a leader who deploys populist rhetoric and plebiscitary linkages to mobilize support in civil society without originating in or having ties to a broad social movement. But it must mobilize and typically does so through movement type actions, style and rhetoric, even while seeking to keep control of the mobilization dynamics it unleashes.266 Whatever its origins, the logic of the populist anti-​party party leads it to adopt movement style rhetoric, tactics, and organizational structures that replace traditional party models, logics, and norms. The populist anti-​party party is a hybrid movement party despite its pretense to be a non-​party, but it is, as we have argued, a distinctive type of movement party in two respects. First, unlike earlier movement parties strongly wed to a particular ideology or issue (e.g., Greens), populist versions are catch-​all in that they seek to appeal to a wide range of diverse groups by erecting chains equivalence across many and often conflicting. Yet they are movement parties in that they retain movement logics regarding internal organization and resort to

102  Populism and Civil Society movement forms of activism, while also participating as parties in the electoral game and in government. Given their anti-​establishment stance and claim to be more directly democratic as the voice of the people than established parties, populist anti-​party movement parties cannot abandon their movement stance. Indeed they are a new form of anti-​system party in that they seek fundamental change rather than mere policy shifts and target not the electoral system but the party system itself, albeit indirectly. Populist movement parties play the electoral game but, as we have seen, distort it by fostering new forms of severe polarization, outbidding, and delegitimizing of opponents. Populist catch-​all movement parties must maintain electoral competition for their own legitimacy but as we will see in ­chapter 3, they tend to undermine the fairness of democratic elections once in power without ever renouncing them ideologically. Indeed they challenge the organizational logic of other parties that still rely on delegation and middle range professional party cadre while purportedly replacing it with movement style direct democratic forms. As we will see, the digital party format that some, like the Italian M5S movement party (a self-​styled non-​party) have embraced is the culmination of this logic.267 Thus populist anti-​parties typically do not normalize along the lines Kitschelt suggested, even when in power, if they remain populist. But neither are they able to avoid the tensions internal to that hybrid form of mobilization and organization they trigger and create. This is evident in the tension filled mobilizing strategies adopted by populist anti-​party parties in civil and political society.

Conclusion In the next chapter we discuss the authoritarian tendencies in contemporary versions of populism. Here we conclude by summarizing the effects populist movement parties can have on competitive party systems in constitutional democracies. We will discuss alternative democracy-​reinforcing movement party relations and ways to respond to the authoritarian threat of populism in and out of power in the final chapter of this book. The standard list of core functions of parties in a democracy include three generalized roles: transmitting/​shaping demands of civil society, backed by pressure, to the government; recruiting and training political candidates for public office; and governing.268 With respect to the first category, Sartori in his classic text stresses the expressive and channeling functions of parties.269 The former involves transmitting and articulating claims, grievances, and demands of citizens to the government. The channeling function entails the shaping and organizing of otherwise chaotic public will and the aggregation, selection, and even manipulation of public opinion.270 Obviously parties play a key role in framing

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  103 demands and shaping opinions when they formulate political projects and programs, aggregate interests, select some demands and grievances as central, and translate these into political programs and ultimately public policies.271 Thus parties cannot be reduced to being a mere transmission belt of pre-​existing demands in civil society, nor can they be seen as mere manipulators that construct such demands and grievances from above for their own purposes of electoral success.272 Supply and demand both matter: the supply of issues, frames, opinions, and identities has to meet up with the pent-​up demands and grievances in civil society so that they resonate with peoples’ concerns. The competitive struggle for the vote implies the function of integrating various groups into the political process by being responsive to their needs and helping to articulate their diverse demands. Thus an autonomous pluralistic party system lends itself to expression from below more than manipulation from above regardless of inevitable manipulation.273 Ideally, the channeling of political conflict into electoral competition for public office fosters the aggregation of interests through the creation of broad programs (party platforms) and programmatic linkages with voters based on a two-​way communication that parties in a pluralist party system excel in.274 Indeed, aggregating diverse but related interests into broad programs was one of the key tasks of the traditional mass party.275 But all parties simplify choices for voters, generate symbols of identification and loyalty, educate citizens, and mobilize people to participate in, at least, elections. As organizations, the recruitment of leadership, office seeking, and training of political elites with an eye to gaining public power are also core party functions.276 This dimension is central to the analysis not only of discrete parties but also of party systems (and of electoral systems together with the structure of political opportunities organized by a state).277 Clearly party systems are influenced and in part organized by the state structure and governmental type (sometimes but not always by a constitution): the political opportunity structure they set up influence party structure and strategy, and vice versa. What matters from our perspective is how the dynamics of party competition generate and are affected by populist anti-​party parties and in what way these differ from the anti-​system party as per Sartori’s classical analysis. Qua the tasks of governing, the ideal typical function of political parties in a democracy is to create majorities (singly or in coalitions), organize the legislature and the government, and to occupy key institutions of the state (heads of ministries or departments).278 They staff many public offices and socialize potential political leaders within their organizational apparatuses wherein they generate suitable candidates and nominees. Responsibilities in government have to be allocated across different departments and require disciplined support in the legislature, often through negotiations or in coalitions with other parties. In presidential or semi-​presidential systems, parties also staff legislative

104  Populism and Civil Society committees, organize legislative procedures, and facilitate everyday agreements on the legislative agenda. This requires a willingness to collaborate and compromise with the opposition or with minority parties. But it also requires the willingness to take on the responsibility for governing for the body politic as a whole and to accept accountability for their policies.279 Additionally, the democratic functioning of party systems requires their autonomy from the state.280 Indeed parties also organize the opposition in and out of government along with dissent, control government administrations, and implement policy objectives, as well as ensuring responsibility for government actions.281 Of the three sets of functions parties typically perform in constitutional democracies, populist movement parties clearly succeed in expressing, channeling, and framing the demands of important portions of the electorate, albeit arguably in a distorted way. As we have seen, populist mobilizations certainly fill the gap left open by establishment parties by articulating the demands of those feeling ignored, precarious, or left behind by political economic and social developments associated with post-​industrial societies and globalized economies. They simplify choices for voters and generate symbols of identification and loyalty, thus mediating between civil society and the political system even as the anti-​party stance of populist movement parties lead them to disdain intermediary bodies. But simplification in the populist case is over-​simplification insofar as it takes on the us–​them, friend–​enemy binary, blaming elites and minorities for structural problems and fostering, as we have seen, affective political polarization. Despite their alleged direct democratic ties between party, leader and “the people,” populist parties, as we have seen, turn participatory into plebiscitary linkages and focus on rhetoric’s, affect, and other mechanisms of identification over serious deliberative exchanges, and thus their emphasis on the expressive function leads to divisiveness and heightens the risk of turning competition into conflict, instead of channeling conflict into party political competition. Organizationally we have seen that populist movement parties typically retain movement style postures and forms of mobilization (at least rhetorically) even while in power.282 They embrace the hollowing out of parties given their anti-​elitist stance, discourse of direct democracy, and cult of participation typically steered and overshadowed by plebiscitary mobilization strategies aimed at triggering acclaim. In particular, populist movement parties, especially the digital ones, dislike the party bureaucracy—​the hierarchy of cadres and branches, committees and subcommittees that made traditional parties resemble governments in waiting—​and seek to bypass it with movement structures and digital platforms allegedly enabling direct participatory democracy.283 As we have seen, this strengthens the party’s center and periphery at the expense of an intermediate cadre, fostering the emergence and power of what Gerbaudo aptly calls “hyper leaders.”284 The trend toward plebiscitary linkages, especially

Populism as Mobilization and as a Party  105 once the populist movement party is in power, follows from all this despite the predilection for participatory linkages, rhetorically at least. Participation may be enhanced but not, as we have seen, the ability of citizens to contest the new elite leaders or their manipulation of choices put before the participants.285 In short, plebiscitary and participatory linkages can go together. The tendency is either to openly embrace plebiscitary over participatory linkages or, covertly, to create a centralized inner circle while furthering the evisceration of the party on the ground and of any potentially internal autonomous challenges to the party leadership in the shape of movement circles or competent middle level officials. Accordingly, instead of training political elites and recruiting competent potential leaders with organizational and political experience from working in the party, leaders of populist movement parties invariably try, once in power, to cling to it and thus are wary of serious internal challengers. Nor do they seek to articulate and aggregate political interests into a coherent party program with clear policy initiatives to which they are committed and for which they can be held accountable once in government. Indeed, the unwillingness of populist hybrid movement parties to deescalate their rhetoric or reduce their anti-​establishment posturing is impressive. It is the case even populist parties in power attempt to control/​abolish the autonomy of movement forms and actors to serve their power political purposes, streamlining these, thereby often undermining their ability to work with the opposition and to respect dissent. As already indicated, populist parties in government do not readily acknowledge the legitimacy of the opposition, nor are they willing to compromise to reach generalizable goals—​the aim is not to engage in responsible government but to remain in power at whatever cost. By not abandoning their anti-​ establishment rhetoric, populist parties in government eschew responsibility for government actions, engaging instead in the politics of blame to avoid being held to account for failures in future elections. To be sure, it is possible that the populist type of anti-​party movement party could be absorbed into an intact democratic party system and political order as ultimately happened with some of the anti-​system parties studied by Sartori. But Sartori observed that it took half a century for the Marxist socialists to integrate, and that their integration was not without losses in many countries to communist parties. Worse, democracy collapsed in the interim (the interwar period in Italy, Germany, Spain).286 It is also true that post-​WWII social democratic parties normalized and operated with good faith once democratic party systems working with capitalist economies embraced the welfare state. Whether populist movement parties can normalize and can integrate without the breakdown of democracy once they are in power remains an open question. The only case where this occurred has been Syriza in Greece and under great pressure from the EU and a severe economic crisis. We do not argue that it is impossible for

106  Populism and Civil Society populist movement parties to become responsible parties once in power, but we think it unlikely given their populist commitments and political logic. Finally, the populist leader refuses differentiation of the party, the movement, and the state even when in power and rejects the principle of self-​limitation regarding institutions, majorities, other parties, and other social movements. This undermines the chances for a competitive party system to function properly insofar as it transforms the dynamics of party competition into friend–​enemy confrontations and fosters out-​bidding, escalation of rhetoric generally, and severe affective polarization. Should other parties adopt populist methods to compete with populists, the party system and political competition generally would devolve into a destructive cycle distorting instead of enhancing democracy. Populist attempts to democratize parties so that they resemble the open, fluid participatory structure of movements, or attempts to bypass them through referenda, plebiscites, or digital platforms in the name of returning sovereignty to the people, are examples of the over extension of movement logic into the party political sphere of power that invariably ends up undermining or blocking the development of party forms that make democracy work and distorting the movement dynamics that can make it work better.287 We take seriously the populist critiques of closed party-​political systems (“oligarchies”), of growing inequality and welfare deficits in advanced capitalist societies, and lack of social solidarity with and precarious standing of those suffering from political choices tied to neo-​liberal modes of hyper-​globalization.288 Yet we must also take seriously the threat that populist movement-​parties themselves pose to democracy once they are in and especially are the government. We turn to the issue of the threat to democracy of populist governments, in the next chapter and later in the conclusion to the book.

3

Populist Governments and Their Logic The electoral success of populist leaders throughout the world, in both new and long-​consolidated democracies, and the relative longevity of several populist governments call for analysis of their logic and dynamics. Throughout this book we have argued that while populism is situated within the democratic imaginary, it nevertheless poses a profound threat to the quality of democratic governance and ultimately to the very existence of democratic regimes. We maintain that populism in power entails a logic that propels populist governments to eviscerate democracy while invoking democratic legitimacy and while making use of written constitutions and democratic forms, including but not only elections. Of course, depending on empirical circumstances, namely sociological and institutional givens, the extent to which the authoritarian potential is realized can be different from case to case. Nevertheless, the logic of populism is authoritarian, despite its reliance on democratic legitimation and on forms such as elections and participatory mobilization. The authoritarianism inherent in populist logic becomes discernable once populists win power, shape government institutions, reshape the norms of governing, and replace or revise constitutions to expand and ensure their power. Populism’s logic leads to the production of hybrid political forms when populists enter and especially when they become “the” government. Indeed, if they enter government and remain populist, populist politicians ultimately tend toward regime change, in three stages. The first stage, that can be bypassed if the initial electoral victory of populists is comprehensive, is the occupation of the key posts in one or more (but not all!) branches of government, most importantly the executive. We call this “populism in government.”1 Depending on the power of the captured branch, this form too could be described as a hybrid, but in our conception, and in view of the conflicts under this form, it is better to interpret it as still within the regime type of constitutional democracy but a form in which hybridization begins to occur. The hybrid quality here pertains to the government rather than the regime. The second stage, which has been reached everywhere populists occupy all or most major institutions of power, entails more radical hybridization and the creation of a hybrid regime. At this stage the institutions occupied are still those of a constitutional democracy, but their coordination, functioning, and periodic renewal are to a significant extent freed from constitutional limitation and democratic accountability. We call

108  Populism and Civil Society it “populism as the government” and argue that it generates a new, populist hybrid regime whether by formal constitutional means or informally. Populism as “the” government should be seen neither as a constitutional democracy nor as an authoritarian dictatorship but as a hybrid form borrowing formal (but never entirely formal!) elements from the first and many (but never all) actual practices from the second. Using a conception inherited from Ernst Fraenkel’s Dual State2 we could say that under a populist hybrid regime the question of the ultimate priority of the prerogative (governmental will) or the normative (rule of law) remains contested, in other words undecided. From another point of view focusing on electoral politics, the category of competitive authoritarianism was meant to describe this same state of affairs.3 Nevertheless, we want to avoid classifying the hybrid form under the general category of authoritarian regimes. Moreover, unlike many other interpreters, we believe this mixed form can be relatively stabilized and long lasting. Yet we too maintain that authoritarian-​democratic hybridity has obvious elements of implicit tension and potential instability, especially because its formal elements can be bases of contestation and oppositional mobilization. Such threats to populist hybrid regimes can be fully neutralized only by a transition to a third stage, a fully authoritarian form, that we will call (pseudo-​populist or, more simply, populist) dictatorship. There are relatively few cases of this type (arguably: today’s Russia and Venezuela) but efforts in the same direction can be discerned under all populist governments, and especially those that have been challenged by popular mobilization and/​or by the unexpected results in even unfair elections and plebiscites. Dictatorship is not the only possible outcome of populist government, but it becomes increasingly probable once such governments have constructed a hybrid regime. The obvious question pertains to thresholds. That between stages one and two, between populism “in” government and “the” government, seems to be deceptively easy to specify, at least in theory, with the key institutional difference between occupying one (or even some) as against all branches of power. Yet, the occupation of institutions other than the executive allows for degrees, making the determination of even of this threshold more difficult in practice. It is even harder to pinpoint the threshold for the transition to the third stage, the authoritarian regime we call here populist dictatorship. For this type too the formal institutions generally survive from the previous regime. But their logic and functioning becomes fully authoritarian, with the forms being entirely eviscerated. The constitution, old or new, is now a document that hides rather than constitutes the real map of power.4 If there is formal separation of powers, the branches entirely lose autonomy and are controlled by the central authority. If there are elections or referenda, these cannot be lost by the government. If the citizens have formal rights, these can be violated at will. While there is a “normative

Populist Governments and Their Logic  109 state” (in Fraenkel’s sense) with rules as in all modern societies, the primacy of the prerogative can arbitrarily overrule these without any limits or restrictions. The last of these character traits seems to be an either/​or proposition. But in reality, under populist governments the domination of will over rules can happen gradually, step by step, and through experiments undertaken that are inadequately resisted. This is even truer for the undermining of the adherence to the constitution, of the separation of powers, of free and fair elections, as well as of legal security for individuals and collectives. When the trend is in the same direction in all or most of these domains, we can safely speak of an authoritarian logic. While one can imagine the anti-​democratic trends occurring separately, in reality authoritarianism in each domain affects the quality of democracy in all the rest. Nevertheless, while the threshold between stages two and three may be clear on the level of ideal types, passing it under populist governments may be gradual, uncertain, politically contestable, and even reversible. Such are the consequences of hybridity on the epistemological level. The break with the democratic imaginary of populist dictatorship (the third stage) as an ideal type is easy to maintain theoretically. But since very few populist governments have turned into open dictatorships, to claim the break with constitutional democracy in the empirically more important first and second stages of populism in power may seem overly polemical. Populists in (and out of) power situate themselves in the democratic frame, rely on democratic legitimacy through elections, and deny that what they do undermines democracy. Instead they often purport to deliver “real,” “substantive,” “direct” democracy, replacing what they see as democratically deficient, “merely formal,” liberal constitutional democracy. Moreover, as we have indicated, they claim to act in the name of and for the “real people”—​the true popular sovereign—​whom they alone claim to directly embody/​represent. On the contrary, we maintain that the analysis of populism in power will reveal a particular logic of governance on the inherited terrain of a democratic regime that undermines democracy by distorting or dismantling the key principles, norms, institutions, and prerequisites that make democracy work and, equally important, keep it open to improvement while blocking authoritarianism. Thus to make our case, we must return again to the concept of democracy, clarify its procedures, principles, norms, prerequisites, internal dynamics, and tensions, in order to pinpoint how populist government derogates from it while maintaining its outward forms and processes. We must also analyze the dynamics and processes by which populist governments eviscerate, or “hybridize,” democracy by mixing it with authoritarian practices and norms.5 We have already discussed populism as a movement and movement party seeking power. In this chapter we will first focus on the next two stages of populism on the trajectory to power: populists in government, i.e., holding key posts of legislative and

110  Populism and Civil Society executive power; and populism as the government, i.e., the situation in which populists control all governmental institutions.6 This will allow us not only to construct a better understanding of the trajectory of populist governments (democratic backsliding) but also to see the dynamics that ensue once populist control is more consolidated. Put differently, these distinctions allow us to clarify three vexing taxonomic issues regarding: (a) the conceptualization of the different forms taken by government under populist leadership; (b) the threshold and dynamics of regime change; and (c) the nature of the regimes that emerge. It is here that we will try to further clarify the two thresholds: that concerning the transition from a democratic to a populist hybrid regime and second; and the step to a full-​fledged authoritarian regime (populist dictatorship). Finally, getting the logic and dynamic of populists “in” and as “the” government right will help elucidate the high stakes involved in political challenges that have a chance to prevent democratic backsliding and/​or breakdown.

Democracy Revisited There is nothing new about challenges to “liberal constitutional democracy” from the right or from the left. More interesting than approaches that reject democracy tout court are those that purport to offer an alternative, more direct, real, or substantive form of democracy allegedly better suited to the ideal of popular sovereignty than the formal, representative, “liberal,” constitutionalist model.7 Of course both sorts of challenges are coextensive with the emergence of modern democracy itself. As we argued in ­chapter 1, populist interpretations of democracy and in particular of the idea of popular sovereignty appeared at the beginning of modern democracy in the great revolutions and have been recurrent throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. We have also argued that democratic deficits are inherent in representative democracy, and while no democratic regime can dispense with institutions of political representation, they certainly can be supplemented with additional democratic forms that enhance the quality of democracy and potentially make it more democratic.8 Populist movements tend to become important in response to glaring democratic deficits, and some have triggered major realignments and improvements in the inclusiveness and/​ or the quality of really existing constitutional democracies, albeit indirectly. Put differently, in response to popular (sometimes populist) challenges to insufficiently inclusive, unresponsive, procedurally inadequate, or unjust democratic institutions (and outcomes), “liberal” democracies have been pushed at times by movements to become more democratic, more inclusive, and more just. But when populists win power and run the government, the greater inclusiveness and new participatory mechanisms, if they introduce them at all, come at the

Populist Governments and Their Logic  111 price of new exclusions, and evisceration of the very democratic system they supposedly seek to improve.9 This is equally true of populisms of the left and the right. As Juan Linz noted long ago, attempts to (fully) substitute “real,” “substantive” for “liberal democratic” institutions point to authoritarianism, not to a higher quality of democracy.10 We take the contemporary populist critique of existing democracies and of the hegemonic “liberal democratic” model seriously: the democratic, welfare, and status/​solidarity deficits experienced over the past fifty years are real.11 Indeed, when populist challenges to “liberal democracy” become widespread and profound enough, it is incumbent on analysts to rethink democracy itself especially when challengers enlist “radical” democracy on their side. We are, in the 21st century, again confronted with a struggle over the meaning of democracy: this time triggered by successful populist challenges in new and in long consolidated constitutional democracies, that dispute their democratic credentials as well as the model of democracy that they subscribe to. Populist governments today claim the mantle of democratic legitimacy and reject the very idea of what they call “liberal democracy,” in favor of an allegedly more democratic alternative. While they do not abandon representation or elections, they reinterpret their meaning and dynamic. It should be clear by now that we reject analyses that locate these deficits in the linkage of democracy with allegedly “alien elements”: liberal, republican, and/​ or constitutionalist. Instead as indicated in c­ hapter 1, we locate the democracy deficit structurally in democracy itself: as a constant possibility in an open, indeterminate political system whose outcomes depend on institutional design and key norms of political behavior but also on the results of contestation over public policy, projects, and processes. Democratic deficits and the populist challenges to them are thus inherent in every democratic representative political system: they are not due to the liberal, constitutionalist, or republican features of modern democracy—​features without which democracy is impossible, not just flawed. We explore the tensions between constitutionalism and popular sovereignty (democracy) in ­chapter 4. We argue that the different historical trajectories of each and the different weights they place on meta rules allocating and regulating democratic decision making powers, the scope of majority decision-​making, participation, and voice, respectively, create serious problems for constitutional democracies only if one extreme—​limitation and checking vs. untrammeled majority rule—​is emphasized at the expense of the other. In short, a reflexive relationship is needed between the two deeply linked dimensions of democracy today—​constitutionalism and popular sovereignty—​in order to realize the three key democratic ideals of political equality, freedom, and self-​government under law. In this chapter we will make a similar claim regarding the alleged tension between liberalism and democracy. They too have diverse historical

112  Populism and Civil Society trajectories and logics, but we will argue that political liberalism enhances rather than diminishes democracy, claims by a wide variety of populists to the contrary notwithstanding. In order to identify and parry the populist challenge, it is thus crucial for democratic theorists to clarify democracy’s prerequisites, its normative and empirical presuppositions, and its internal tensions and dynamics. As is well known, much effort has been dedicated to rethinking democracy in the wake of the third wave of democratization that began in the 1970s in Southern Europe, continued throughout the 1980s in Latin America, and culminated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the attempts to create democratic regimes in East and Central Europe in the 1990s.12 Democratic theorists soon realized that while the mantle of democratic legitimacy was deemed crucial except for openly authoritarian dictatorships, the use of democratic procedures, especially elections and even party political competition, was hardly tantamount to sufficient democratization nor a sign of an automatic (or even gradual) transition to democracy. In short, the emergence of what some call electoral or competitive authoritarianism forced democratic theorists to rethink the prerequisites of democracy.13 Because no really existing democracy lives up to the democratic ideal (however this is construed), the question was how to distinguish between regimes with the trappings of democratic institutions, such as competitive elections, that still are authoritarian from those that are minimally democratic.14 Put differently the issue was how to know when transformations of authoritarian regimes that introduce democratic methods actually cross the threshold to democracy, as distinct from the introduction of electoral competitive processes as a mere façade or instrument for authoritarians seeking to remain in power with the benefit of democratic legitimacy. Theorists and analysts of comparative politics produced an important literature in that regard, developing useful ideal types of varieties of hybrid regimes, of new authoritarian regime types, and of conceptions of minimal democracy, such as “competitive” or “electoral” authoritarianism and “delegative democracy.” We shall draw on this literature in this chapter.15 For we argue that we confront a symmetrical problem today. Our concern is to discern what transformations populist governments introduce into democratic regimes that are tantamount to their hybridization in an authoritarian direction, such that democratic backsliding and even the shift to a new hybrid regime occur albeit without an obvious and sudden break with or breakdown of the democratic regime. We do not believe that the way to proceed is to construct a minimalist definition of democracy à la Schumpeter or Sartori, even though we too seek to parry attacks on representative constitutionalist democracies, which challenge them as elitist and undemocratic in the name of an alternative idealized participatory direct democracy, this time of a populist nature.16 While it is important to establish a baseline, a democratic minimum, the strategy of thereby separating the

Populist Governments and Their Logic  113 democratic ideal (prescription) from descriptive analysis of really existing democracies must fail. This approach is unable to generate adequate criteria to differentiate between democracy, oligarchy, and regimes that are democratic regarding their citizens but exclusionary and politically exclusionary or authoritarian regarding important minorities: i.e., that do not give full citizenship rights to all adults subject to the binding collective decisions of the government.17 Nor is it adequate to focus only on procedures for getting into public office and acquiring public power at the expense of the other norms and prerequisites of democracy. Democracy, as Charles Taylor has recently argued, is a telic concept: inevitably normative, regulative, and teleological as regards its constitutive standards of political equality, political freedom, and self-​government under law.18 These are standards we never fully meet but may be at any time approaching or sliding away from. Yet we need them to understand the democratic project.19 The principles, norms, and prerequisites of democracy cannot be severed entirely from the empirical procedures and institutions that purport to realize it. Without an understanding of the former, we lack standards that allow us to judge such claims or to argue for further democratization aimed at improving the quality of really existing democracies, or even to claim that any existing democracy has reached its feasible limits. Robert Dahl’s solution of construing democratic standards in the form of regulative principles—​counterfactuals to be approximated—​was a good one and we will return to these principles.20 With this in mind we think it important to develop a multileveled concept of a democratic regime—​one that includes the principles, norms, procedures, mechanisms, and the institutional predicates of democracy along with certain informal prerequisites and dynamics regarding civil society and counter-​ democracy.21 We will construct our model with a view toward populist derogations from the democratic ideal, norms, institutions, and practices that point beyond the threshold of a democratic regime. We intend our ideal type conception of democracy to be understood as allowing for a spectrum of empirical institutional possibilities that approximate it more or less, while enabling the analyst to assess what arrangements and dynamics undermine democracy, by abusing some democratic institutions so as to eviscerate others, such that a regime can no longer be deemed even minimally democratic. Indeed it is also imperative to understand what democracy as a regime entails in a philosophical register—​i.e., as a symbolic order—​for this will help us to assess whether the populist alternative to “liberal democracy” is democratic in its logic or not. Thus, we will consider not only democracy as a political system but also the form of society it helps to create and in which it is embedded. To understand democracy as a regime let us remind the reader what is meant by the terms regime, government, and state. Following the political science

114  Populism and Civil Society approach dominant in comparative politics, we use the term regime in the first instance to refer to: an ensemble of patterns that determines the methods of access to the principal public offices; the characteristics of the actors admitted to or excluded from such access; the strategies that actors may use to gain access; and the rules that are followed in the making of publicly binding decisions. To work properly, the ensemble must be institutionalized . . . Increasingly, the preferred mechanism of institutionalization is a written body of laws undergirded by a written constitution, though many enduring political norms can have an informal, prudential, or traditional basis.22

This concept includes the constitution, but is not reducible to it. As should be fairly obvious, significant dimensions of a regime can be formally created by constitutional legislation. This is especially true of the division of power, i.e., the choice between federal and unitary structures of the state. But it is equally the case for the form of the separation of powers within government. At the same time, many of the fundamental patterns of state and governmental practice are produced by ordinary statutes, executive decisions, judicial interpretations, and customs if these are institutionalized as conventions, i.e., survive for significant periods and become parts of the framework of political action and expectation. All these can significantly modify the constitution of regimes in the material sense. We use the term government to refer to legislative, executive, and judicial organs—​the horizontal relations among them and the powers allocated to them. As is well known in democracies there can be a variety of governmental forms, the three main types being: presidential, parliamentary, and semi-​presidential. There are, moreover, important variants possible within each of these forms, especially as they interact with state forms: federal or unitary. These differences may affect the likelihood of success of the emergence of authoritarianism out of populist governments, but we mention them in order to differentiate forms of government from regime types and to argue that populists can come to power in any one of these types of governmental systems. While “regime” here refers to procedures regulating access to state power, and government, to the three main branches or organs of public power typically established through constitutional design (legislative, executive, judicial), the third term in the institutional trilogy, “state,” pertains to the apparatus used for the exercise of public power within a territory and in international relations. The structure of the state can be unitary or federal, centralized or decentralized, as determined by the regime. Yet the state is conceptually distinct from the specific form of government. It is typically and rightly seen as more permanent than

Populist Governments and Their Logic  115 the government’s elected officials: it includes bureaucratic institutions and actors such as the military, the diplomatic corps, tax authorities, security officials, the police, local administrators, the courts and officials involved in the administration of justice, and so forth.23 As we shall argue, democracy necessarily involves an institutional separation between the state and the government. The relative autonomy of state administration is needed to ensure that officials are not pressured by incumbent politicians and thus can appear (and be) relatively unpolitical and unbiased.24 The autonomy of civil society is also crucial for ensuring the accountability of political officials and for articulating public opinion in free public spaces.25 We return to the latter issue further on. For now it is worth noting that in a democratic regime, the police, administrators of justice, courts, tax authorities, and so forth must be free from pressure by incumbent politicians regarding the treatment of opposition politicians and of ordinary citizens.26 That said, we turn to the philosophical presuppositions and symbolic meaning of a democratic regime and of the symbolic order it breaks with and precludes. By shifting to the level of the symbolic we follow Claude Lefort and his use of the concept of form of society—​its constitution (regime in the political science sense) combined with the idea of the mode of life of a society: including the implicit norms determining what is just and unjust, good and evil, desirable and undesirable, noble and ignoble.27 The philosophical notion of form of society touches on conditions of legitimacy, authority-​obedience relations, the structure of power, and distinction among social ranks that are deemed legitimate. But it involves much more, for it pertains to what provides intelligibility to a social organization and what gives society a form, i.e., the symbolic order that bestows unity on a society within which social divisions and institutional differentiations articulate themselves.28 Following Tocqueville, we as well as Lefort understand democracy not only as a political regime but also as a form of society. According to Lefort this involves a key mutation in the symbolic order as well as a new principle of legitimacy vis-​à-​vis prior non-​democratic regimes: the construction of the place of power as empty.29 Such a structure does not only mean that the institutional apparatus of democracy ensures competition, elections, and alternation and prevents any branch of government from appropriating the political or incorporating power into themselves. It also means that democracies are marked by and embrace the form of a society that welcomes and preserves indeterminacy: The locus of power is an empty place such that no group or individual can be consubstantial with it, and it cannot be represented as incarnated or embodied in anyone.30 Disincorporation of the political means that no figure of mediation can incarnate society’s representation of itself or mediate between the real and the imaginary, between this world and some other one, to ground the social order in an unquestionable foundation. Democracy is thus instituted and sustained by the

116  Populism and Civil Society dissolution of the markers of certainty inaugurating a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of law, power, and knowledge. Democratic legitimacy involves a process of questioning and contestation and a politics that such indeterminacy makes possible. The same is true from a slightly different perspective about human rights. While it is their essence to be declared, rights are not simply the objects of a declaration from above. It is the actors themselves who create their freedom by declaring their rights whether or not some document has already acknowledged them. These declarations open a discursive/​contestatory process of claims and counterclaims such that mobilizing for rights and against injustice becomes part and parcel of democracy and politics. Thus, Lefort insisted, “Rights are one of the generative principles of democracy.”31 They are not merely liberal limits to democracy. Accordingly, the impossibility of representing democratic society as a body means that social division is constitutive of the unity of that society, as are social contestation, heterogeneity, and plurality. The lack of any substantial unity that could be embodied by a ruler, keeping the place of power empty (but not abolishing it), calls forth the erection of a stage on which conflict is carried out for all to see and in an effort to ensure its constructive effects for the democratic regime. Moving from the symbolic to the level of normative principles, democracy, as already indicated, is a telic concept that involves three regulative ideals: political equality, political freedom, and self-​government under law. Political equality, or what Dahl calls “the idea of intrinsic equality,” means that in the political domain no one is entitled to subject anyone else to their will or authority by virtue of who or what they are, no one has a pre-​given natural right to rule, no one can be subjected to the political power of another without consent, and all must be regarded as of equal intrinsic worth. Put differently, the idea is that in a democracy everyone counts, everyone’s vote has equal weight, and everyone deserves to have their interests considered and has the right to express them. The concept of democracy literally means rule of the demos, the citizen body. It thus entails political freedom insofar as the rule of the citizens involves the idea of living under laws of their own choosing. It also implicitly involves a mode of political freedom extended to an inclusive understanding of citizenship that is absent in any other political regime.32 Indeed as Hans Kelsen argued nearly one hundred years ago, freedom is a principle at the core of democracy because as individuals one can only be free in a free political order.33 This means that democracy and freedom coincide conceptually insofar as members of the democratic political community participate in the creation of the governmental and state orders and in making its collectively binding decisions, albeit, under modern conditions, indirectly through their representatives whom they can choose, influence, hold accountable, and replace.34 In modern democracy, this

Populist Governments and Their Logic  117 requires the election of political representatives who in fact make collectively binding laws for the polity and thus “rule,” but at the pleasure of the citizenry to whom they are accountable and responsible. What distinguishes democratic from non-​democratic rulers are both the principles and rules that condition how the former come to power and the norms and practices that hold them accountable for their actions. The democratic form of coming into power or democratic competition has many components but also minimum prerequisites that will matter for us when we try to ascertain the threshold potentially violated by populists. They are: (a) free and fair elections; (b) broad protections of civil liberties that includes voting equality; and (c) rule of law involving stability, predictability, and universality enforced by judicial and administrative institutions.35 When these procedural conditions are fulfilled the “majority” that wins elections has earned the right to make decisions, at least temporarily, also by majority rule.36 The legitimacy of majority rule in elections and in government is by no means unproblematic. For Kelsen the majority principle secures freedom better than any other insofar as it entails that more individual’s wills coincide with the collectively binding decisions made by their political representatives than in any other kind of political system. Thus the principle of majority is intrinsic to democracy, and it means that as many people as possible shall be free and as few as possible shall find their wills in opposition to the will of the social order. But, as Kelsen shows, the majority principle also entails the right of the minority to exist in parliament and in civil society so as to contest the power and substantive decisions of the majority, to compete electorally, and to become, if successful, the new majority or part of it. This would entail convincing others of their views and projects, recruiting new allies, and perhaps, changing the minds of some who voted for the existing majority. Equally important, this argument disputes the claim that the majority represents the minority directly. Instead, there are always at least two groups (whose composition fluctuates) in a democracy: the majority and the minority; and the former’s collectively binding decisions can be accepted by the latter instead of being seen as majority tyranny provided that informally a process of mutual influence takes place even before but also during legislation. This entails not only the right of the minority, or minorities, to continue to agitate for their substantive views if they feel injustice is at stake but also the willingness to listen and to compromise on the part of the majority.37 Compromise and alternation (and the freedom to protest and mobilize in civil society) are thus key principles undergirding the legitimacy of majority rule. Yet even if some version of the procedures constitutive of majority rule is necessary, it is not yet sufficient for democracy’s existence as a political regime. To make majority rule democratic, both informal and formal norms must be sustained. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have cogently argued that at least

118  Populism and Civil Society two key, informal (unwritten) norms orienting elite behavior are fundamental to the proper functioning and survival of democracy as a regime: mutual toleration and forbearance.38 Mutual toleration means that competing parties and politicians accept one another as legitimate rivals, forbearance that politicians exercise restraint in deploying their institutional prerogatives. Mutual toleration precludes portraying rivals as enemies. Forbearance is the opposite of “constitutional hardball,” i.e., the use by a party leader in power of their temporary control of institutions to gain maximum advantage, violating the spirit if not the letter of the law.39 Beyond informal norms, there are also formal ones that need to complement and limit majority rule. A baseline of political and civil rights securing key freedoms of the citizenry is necessary in order for the democratic process to function properly. The most obvious are the freedoms of speech, association, and access to information and to alternative sources of information, all of which protect the existence and autonomy of civil and political public spheres. As Aziz Huq and Thomas Ginsburg recently argued, such rights, together with free and fair elections in which a losing side concedes power, and the rule of law involving the stability, predictability, non-​arbitrariness, universality, fairness, and integrity of administrative or adjudicative legal institutions—​are three institutional predicates of a constitutional democracy.40 We would add a core idea coming from republicanism, namely the separation of powers and especially the autonomy of the judiciary. These are necessary to the maintenance of a reasonable level of democratic responsiveness, unbiased elections, and democratic engagement by ordinary people without fear or coercion.41 Regardless of their sequential historical genesis, and of whether such rights and the rule of law have been associated with liberalism rather than with democracy in the past, the point is that they are deemed functionally intertwined institutional predicates of a democracy today (call it democratic constitutionalism or constitutionalist democracy) that must be guaranteed if one is to speak of a democratic regime.42 As we argued long ago, the sets of rights securing public and private autonomy, including freedoms of speech and association, freedom of information and the media, and personal privacy, are also constitutive of an independent and vibrant civil society, itself a key informal presupposition of democracy.43 It is in civil society that new needs are articulated, dominant norm interpretations challenged, and opinions formed through deliberation, including naming and challenging injustice. The associations, social movements, and, frequently, new political parties are first generated in civil society, and it is in publics that deliberation, and the exchange of information, generate the goals and projects they hope will gain traction in and influence political society’s actors. Critique, resistance, and social contestation in civil society over majority decisions and practices are a crucial way to ensure against blind deference to majority rule and to correct for

Populist Governments and Their Logic  119 political alienation, provided that avenues of influence and responsiveness on the part of political elites are forthcoming.44 These freedoms are also crucial to the development of alternative expertise, for which the media of communication free from state manipulation (albeit not from necessary regulation) are crucial. A free and autonomous civil society, preferably institutionalized through the relevant sets of rights, is a predicate of a democratic regime. Often civil society actors are the key actors pushing for the very establishment of such regimes and for their further democratization, although civil society actors also form counter-​ movements meant to exclude or diminish the rights of others. But civil society also must function according to key norms, if it is to play a constructive role in democracies and in democratization, the most important of which are self-​limitation and nonviolence.45 Self-​limitation means that social movements in civil society must accept social and political plurality even if rhetorically they fashion themselves as the true voice of the sovereign people. Nonviolence means that counter-​movements, minorities, and adversaries in general are not automatically deemed existential enemies to be threatened with physical harm. Their engagement fosters social plurality and what we have called the “plurality of democracies,” i.e., a multiplicity of avenues for participation of the citizenry in democratic politics, so that the associations, movements, media, and civil publics supplement and enrich the electoral party political avenues channeling and organizing participation. Resistance, and counter-​mobilization, depending on its form and orientation, may foster the further democratization of, instead of undermining, democracy itself. This brings us to the other crucial set of informal political predicates of a democratic regime—​key features of the democratic process that Pierre Rosanvallon has called counter-​democracy.46 Noting that the democratic ideal entails a promise (of equality and autonomy/​voice) and a problem, namely the inevitable failure of all democratic regimes to fully realize this promise, he focuses on the logic and dynamics of processes aiming to diminish the gap between norm and reality, combat political alienation, and force those in power to give good reasons for their decisions. Trust is central to the belief in the legitimacy of democratic institutions, but so too is the organization of distrust. While most theorists have focused on the liberal forms of institutionalizing distrust, Rosanvallon concentrates on democratic versions. The former take the form of “preventive power”: institutions such as constitutional designs aimed at limiting the concentration and strength of government and certain basic rights—​the basic driver being distrust of the power of the people and their representatives, doubts about universal suffrage, and fear of its expression.47 Democratic distrust, alternatively, is aimed at establishing good government, ensuring that government is responsive to the electorate and oriented to the “common good” however that is understood.

120  Populism and Civil Society Those whom a given electoral majority elects into power are never “the people” nor do political representatives embody or incarnate the people’s unitary will. They are fallible politicians who may or may not do what they promised—​so the gap between democratic practice and promise is always there. Hence the importance of a set of indirect powers and practices throughout society that organize a durable democracy of distrust, buttressing the episodic democracy of the electoral representative system and complementing the legal institutions erected around that system, which are oriented toward maintaining accountability and fostering good (rather than corrupt) government.48 The three key counter-​democratic institutions Rosanvallon analyzes are the informal powers of oversight, sanction/​ prevention, and judgment.49 The powers of oversight entail vigilance, denunciation, and evaluation regarding government actors’ duplicity or corruption; the powers of prevention pertain to blocking undesirable political decisions through negative publicity and protest; and the powers of judgment, oriented toward accountability, exist in the space between legal prosecution and re-​election and involve inquiry and publicity regarding the behavior of political elites.50 They all can be analyzed from a deliberative participatory perspective insofar, as they trigger processes of justification and preclude blind deference to government majorities. There is some overlap of democratic institutions of distrust with the liberal and republican interests in limited government and preventive power. Indeed, counter-​democracy’s concern for good government echoes that of republican political theory and practice that sought to institutionalize counter-​powers, albeit inside government itself. But the counter-​democratic organization of indirect powers emerges in tandem with modern representative democracy and must be seen as an intrinsic element of a modern democratic regime. Counter-​democracy thus captures a different dimension of popular sovereignty than our civil society argument. The informal powers at issue in the latter are oriented toward the articulation of new needs, norm interpretations, projects, and opinions through civil publics and social movements aiming to influence political society. In the former, counter-​democracy, the focus is more on informally regulating the behavior of political elites and their exercise of power: overseeing, preventing, and judging the abuse of political power by elected representatives. The mechanisms that counter-​democracy uses to bolster democracy itself are: vigilance to deter political corruption; mobilization of public opinion and the media to block irresponsible and destructive legislation or policy proposals; and publicly denouncing malfeasance by elected officials to foster greater accountability. But these can go badly wrong, as Rosanvallon himself has argued, when distrust is absolutized by populist manipulation.51 Populism is in part a pathology of counter-​democracy’s three key forms (oversight, negative sovereignty, judgment) that severely distorts their functioning.52 Far from democratizing democracy or enhancing its quality, populists in power

Populist Governments and Their Logic  121 mobilize counter-​democracy to undermine the democratic, republican, and liberal institutions that a democratic regime relies on.53 This brief articulation of the symbolic meaning, norms, institutions, and practices of democracy (constitutional democracy as a form of society) serves as a normative counterfactual against which one can assess empirically existent democracies that can be more or less democratic. It is not meant to gloss over its internal paradoxes of democracy some of which we have already analyzed in earlier chapters. As Lefort noted, while democracy entails the reference to popular sovereignty, the moment the people actually appear as the electorate they are turned into a mere aggregate of citizens, the majority being a mere numerical statistic. This carries the danger that opportunists claiming to represent, indeed embody, the real people as one, ascribing to them a substantial identity (at least regarding those whom this unity includes), will emerge and may come to power. Instead of the social division and plurality inherent in every society and raised to a reflexive principle in democracy, the very indeterminacy of democracy and the fiction of popular sovereignty invite populist myth-​making about unity. Moreover, the empty place of power characteristic of democracy stands as an invitation to such leaders to occupy this place and to “play the sovereign,” i.e., to purport to incarnate the people and the polity and to close the gap between the real and the symbolic.54 Reflexivity regarding the relationship of rights, especially of the minority to majoritarian legislation, social division, democratic self-​limitation, and democratic self-​correction, is rejected by a conflicting, allegedly democratic, populist myth, namely that society can be made transparent to itself, that the people are unitary and can act as one through their sovereign representative who directly incarnates their will and is thus the only really legitimate representative in a democracy. All serious students of democracy have noticed the gap between counterfactual norms and the practices and institutions of all really existing democracies. Dahl’s influential distinction between democracy and polyarchy, for example, expresses such a dualistic state of affairs. This dualism can be radicalized, thereby opening the door to populism. In Margaret Canovan’s depiction for example, democracy rightly understood has a political theological vision at is core, namely the myth of the sovereignty of the unified self-​governing people, that is to be contrasted to the mundane, ordinary, normal, pragmatic politics of ordinary democracy, the politics of muddling through, making compromises, and settling for second or third best.55 According to her this myth is capable of mobilizing a redemptive politics aiming at restoring sovereignty to the authentic people. Buying into the redemptive myth of the unitary people, Canovan seems to reproduce the populist framing insofar as the people, too, construe mobilization against a disappointing empirical reality of a given democracy. In the name of unitary popular sovereignty the construal is not only understandable but also

122  Populism and Civil Society seems democratic and the only real alternative to resignation. But we argue that this is not the only way to frame democratic dualism, and neither is the choice between myth or resignation the only one. The alternative is to articulate the internal dualism of democracy as between necessary counterfactual or “fictional” norms (of the self-​governing sovereign people) and actual practice (Edmund Morgan), or between regulative ideals of political equality and freedom (Kelsen, Dahl) and deficient reality, or involving inevitably a gap between norm and fact (Habermas, Rawls). These alternative conceptions can indeed spur efforts to better realize the norms, to approximate more closely the ideals and fictions without purporting to abolish legitimate social division altogether. In all of them, democratic reflexivity plays a key role. Reflexivity regarding commitments and values means that we understand that these are ours and that our understanding of them is fallible, and thus all political decision making in a democracy is in principle revisable even at the most fundamental level.56 The ongoing recursive process of democratic elections and accountability, of the relation between civil and political publics, social movements and political parties, government and opposition, individual and minority rights and their enforcement and democratic majoritarian legislation, etc., are all constitutive features of the democratic process that institutionalize reflexivity.57 Democratic reflexivity thus entails openness, learning, and self-​correction, inherent in the right of the opposition and ordinary citizens to contest decisions, goals, and norm interpretations. Interpreting democratic dualism as that of redemptive politics vs. everyday resignation and endorsing the myth of the sovereign people as capable of acting to realize their unitary (general) will is to buy into the dream of reoccupying the empty place of power.58 Since modern society is inevitably divided, the dream can be given political content only by searching for or accepting an instance in which the will is incarnated, most often a populist leader with whom mobilized individuals can emotionally (cathartically) identify and to whom they can blindly defer. These myths and the related politics destroy the symbolic meaning and core of democracy rather than realizing one side of it. They are indeed tantamount to a new political theology.59 The dynamics such myths trigger fully demonstrate their authoritarian logic only once populists are in power. We turn to this now.

Populism in Government: Democracy Enhancing or Eviscerating? As we have argued, populists seek political power, and thus populist movements form parties (movement parties typically), or populist political entrepreneurs generate them from above. The goal of these parties is to compete in democratic elections to be able to enter and control government and exercise power.60 For

Populist Governments and Their Logic  123 our purposes it does not matter for the moment whether the parties are generated from below or from above. It also does not matter whether top-​down mobilization takes place by political insiders who abandon traditional parties, by political outsiders who manage to capture and transform them into personal vehicles, or via some combination of both (MAS in Bolivia, the Tea Party and then Trump’s mobilized supporters in the United States).61 What matters most regarding populists in government is that elections remain important to their legitimacy. Even when attaining governmental power, they cannot abandon their claims to democratic legitimacy and, hence, minimally competitive elections. When “in” government and at least in their very early stages as “the” government, populist forces remain situated within the democratic imaginary and within the frame of a democratic regime. Nevertheless, we argue that the telos of the governmental logic of populism, based on the definitional criteria we have insisted on, is to occupy the empty space of power in the name of the sovereign people as embodied in a leader or a leadership. In practice this means “democratic backsliding” through the gradual evisceration of the core prerequisites, institutions, procedures, and norms of democracy we have described earlier. We have already differentiated government and regime in the first part of this chapter. We argued that there are two forms of populist governmental power: the first, to be “in” government and, the second, its goal, to be “the” government. We also maintained that the move toward the creation of a new, hybrid regime is a serious tendency under the latter. In all cases the key is executive power, which would have to be acquired either in direct election as in presidential systems or by achieving the legislative majority in parliamentary systems. While direct presidential elections focusing on the popular choice of the chief executive has been often considered a key to populist government,62 Max Weber turned out to be right in claiming that parliamentary systems can also produce plebiscitary and what we call populist leaderships.63 Today we have had this insight confirmed in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland. Nevertheless there is still a relevant difference between the two forms. In presidential systems, partially depending on the timing and form of elections, a populist executive can coexist with legislatures in the hands of political opponents. For this reason we have to consider the possibility that populism will be “in” rather than “the” government. Parliamentary systems too, depending in part on the electoral rule, may permit a populist party, that on in its own does not have a legislative majority, to be part of a coalition.64 Given the relevant constitutional structure, it is also possible that only one chamber of two is in the hands of a populist party. Here too we must use the term “in” government. Accordingly, populism can be said to be well on the way to be “the government” when its party alone controls at the very least the executive and legislative branches. Even here we must be careful, because of the possible importance of

124  Populism and Civil Society the third, judicial branch, and more so in the case of federalism. A populist party has all the governmental power only when it controls the courts and the majority of either provincial or state governments, or has instruments that can guarantee the supremacy of the “political” branches and the central (in the US: “federal”) government. Aside from clear constitutional supremacy provisions, one such instrument is the possibility of federal interventions, as in India. Another is statutory control over the jurisdiction and membership of courts that can decide controversies between the center and the units. Yet another is easy access to the constitution making mechanism: an amendment or revision rule that can be used to control courts as well as diminish the powers of federal units. The concept of “in” government implies potential limits to the power of the executive. Very likely, it also involves serious conflicts, as was seen for four years in the United States.65 This possibility was long recognized by critics of presidentialism such as Linz who, following Tocqueville and Marx, thought that here lay the main cause for the authoritarian turn of many plebiscitary presidencies from the two Napoleons to Peron.66 What characterizes populism “in” government is not only the electoral conquest of the executive but the ongoing battle of that branch against the independence of the other branches, the legislature (in separation of power systems), the judiciary, the autonomous governmental agencies and bureaucracies (the state), the governments of federal states, and indeed informal branches like the press and civil associations.67 Put systematically, the logic of populism in government unfolds through a process of hybridization within what is still a democratic regime, whereby authoritarian practices and norms get mixed into the existing democratic regime diminishing its quality and distorting its dynamics.68 “Democratic hybridization” thus entails the piecemeal undermining of key features of constitutional democracy carried out by elected populist executives.69 The populist playbook entails a repertoire of actions by populists in government that undermine the procedural, normative, institutional, party political, counter-​democratic, and civil society prerequisites of democracy. The pathways of hybridization are thus diverse and multiple.70 The first step is to undermine the two key meta-​norms of mutual toleration and forbearance regarding institutional prerogatives.71 Populist elites in government weaken the norm of mutual toleration by portraying the opposition in parliament (or congress) and rival parties generally as part of the corrupt establishment, often accusing them of lack of patriotism (commitment to the true nation) or other serious failings and by treating them as an existential threat. This undercuts the democratic norms of cooperation and compromise insofar as the opposition and rival parties are deemed by definition to be not opponents or even adversaries but enemies, ultimately disloyal to the people’s government. Instead of accepting plurality and exhibiting willingness to agree to disagree, cooperate,

Populist Governments and Their Logic  125 and compromise with rivals, populist executives abandon the norm of mutual toleration by turning governing into a one-​sided winner take all game. This goes together with violation of the other key meta-​norm of democracy, namely institutional forbearance, whereby executives use their institutional prerogatives to the hilt and engage in actions that respect the letter of the law, while obviously violating its spirit.72 “Constitutional hardball” of this sort raises the stakes of politics and witnesses the drive of populists in government to gain control of all governmental institutions and powers. They are “playing for keeps” by engaging in a form of institutional combat aimed at permanently defeating partisan rivals that exhibits no concern for preserving the democratic rules (norms) of the game or for good governance.73 By violating the norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance once in government, populist executives undermine the “soft guardrails of democracy” that help prevent day-​to-​day political competition from turning in to a no-​holds barred conflict.74 The next step involves two strategies on the part of populist governments: attacks on institutions of horizontal accountability and discriminatory legalism.75 As already suggested, populism adheres to “vertical accountability,” defined as reliance on the verdict of voters to stay in power. By horizontal accountability we mean viable institutions including oppositional parties, courts, state structures, and the press that monitor as well as potentially check and challenge the claims and decisions of the executive, and even the majority of the legislature. As indicated, such institutions are not well tolerated by populists because their partisan rivals may control them, but also because independent state officials—​diplomats, bureaucrats, security people with the knowledge and skill to know how the relevant state institutions work and should work and with perhaps a commitment to their integrity and autonomy—​may thwart attempts by populist leaders to expand their prerogatives. The inner logic of populism, based on claims of embodying the unitary will of the popular sovereign, drives personalistic populist leaders to try to concentrate power and dismantle institutional restraints against executive predominance.76 Since they often gain power as political outsiders with the expressed goal of destroying the political establishment portrayed as corrupt and undemocratic, populist leaders in government have no normative commitment to existing democratic institutions.77 The goal of populists in government is to gain control of these institutions and/​or to undermine their autonomy and their powers. Horizontal accountability, institutional checks and balances, the separation of powers, and autonomy of independent parliamentary or executive agencies and of the judiciary are targeted to avoid limitation of the power of the populist executive. As we have seen, on its interpretation of majority rule as majoritarianism, populism must resist all forms of power limitation of the executive elected by the majority. Similarly parties of the opposition must not be in the position to limit the majority of the legislature

126  Populism and Civil Society controlled by the executive.78 Thus they deem institutions of horizontal accountability as hostile, portray them as liberal, not democratic, and pledge to replace “partocracy”—​the rule of “establishment” parties—​with authentic radical democracy, i.e., the unobstructed rule of the authentic people through their representative in the executive. Hence the attacks on institutionalized horizontal counter-​powers, especially independent apex courts that defend differentiation, the separation of powers, and basic rights, typically labeled “liberal” although these institutions are, in our view, also democratic (and republican). There is a good case to be made for the proposition that populist executives in government under democratic regimes seek to turn representative into what O’Donnell called “delegative democracies.”79 The irony is that while populists, particularly in Latin America, have mobilized successfully by challenging delegative democracies as being insufficiently democratic, once they come to power in representative democratic regimes, they reproduce key features of just that political form.80 Specifically, they embrace the premise of the latter that whoever wins election to the presidency is thereby entitled to govern as he or she sees fit, constrained only by the hard facts of existing power relations and by a constitutionally limited term of office, until they succeed in revising even that.81 While, given the needs of plebiscitary legitimacy, populists in a democratic government must in principle comply with the outcome of elections, or “vertical accountability,” they diligently seek, as just indicated, to undermine institutions of horizontal accountability characteristic of representative democracy. Such efforts produce great advantages for the power of incumbents, thus undermining vertical accountability as well—​reducing the fairness of elections and the supposedly equal chances of parties to compete in them. However, O’Donnell argued not only that delegative democracy is not alien to the democratic tradition but also that it is more democratic, albeit less liberal than representative democracy.82 With this claim, he conceded too much to the populist self-​understanding of democracy: unfettered majoritarianism, emotional elections endowing the winner with a chance to rule virtually free of all restraints in the interest of the nation, vertical accountability with voters who after the election are expected to become a cheering audience of what the president does, the posture of the president embodying the nation and a unifying movement instead of a partisan political party, as well as seriously weakened horizontal accountability for the sake of healing and uniting the people/​nation.83 Certainly O’Donnell was not endorsing delegative over representative democracy, but he fell into the trap of populist rhetoric that views liberal, republican and constitutionalist separation of powers and limits on the executive apparently backed by the majority as non-​or anti-​ democratic. Indeed, while populism “in” government relies on delegative democracy, weakening the freedom and fairness of electoral competition threatens to break even with this ideal type.

Populist Governments and Their Logic  127 Here the most important instrument relied on is discriminatory legalism. The tactic undermines another basic prerequisite of democracy—​the rule of law—​ that ensures the stability, predictability, and integrity of legal institutions, and which allow democratic engagement without fear or coercion and of course are intrinsically valuable as well.84 Discriminatory legalism entails using existing law and formal legal authority arbitrarily to favor supporters, to diminish opponents rights including those of autonomous actors in civil society85, to disempower and silence minorities, and to pressure and intimidate independent media. It entails the use of legality to undermine the rule of law, a key prerequisite of high-​ quality democracy. Examples include the use of tax audits and libel suits to harass critical newspapers, the distortion of the purposes of independent agencies through legal and political maneuvers, over-​enforcing the law in some instances and under-​enforcing it in others depending on whether one is a supporter or potential opponent, leveling of trumped-​up charges of corruption or lack of patriotism against opposition politicians, allegations of bias of courts and judges whose independence may lead them to rule against the populist leader and his supporters, and last but hardly least, the legal use of policing to intimidate and chill speech and protest.86 The appointment of cronies to head agencies is part and parcel of all this not to mention the corruption that blossoms when populist executives seek to curry the favor of the rich and powerful or buy support of others by giving legal advantages and through the use of legal prerogatives. While populist movements, especially those on the left, purport to be inclusionary, the slogan “we are the people” is always also used in an exclusionary, polarizing manner against whichever group and set of elites is deemed to be the enemy. Once in government, populist executives do not abandon the friend–​ enemy logic, instead, as we have seen in the last chapter, they exacerbate and embrace extreme, affective polarization.87 Polarization and mobilization are not necessarily destructive of democracy. Indeed if they make political elites more responsive to injustice, exclusion, and lack of voice for certain groups, they can foster further democratization and generate more solidarity with and/​or inclusion of the groups whose perspectives and needs, status, and well-​being have been ignored. But the dynamics of affective political polarization discussed in the previous chapter are destructive, and populist parties and leaders in government embrace them wholeheartedly. The obvious goal is to undermine political competition and diminish the possibility of alternation in power.88 Populists in government continue to engage in negative partisanship, deriding elections in which their opponents win as “rigged,” and delegitimating other political parties and the opposition in parliament (or congress) even while purporting to embrace their right to participate in electoral contests. Populist governments seek to skew the political electoral playing field in their favor through a variety of techniques ranging from diminishing turnout of those likely to vote against

128  Populism and Civil Society them to gerrymandering and manipulation of the electoral rules. Many have taken note of such tactics, which indeed individually are not unique to populists in power. But the populist logic that invariably leads to such tactics is distinctive: to populists, elections are not viewed as mechanisms to aggregate individual preferences to cobble together a temporary majority. Rather, elections are at the service of identification meant to confirm a pre-​existing and substantive (albeit constructed) popular will ultimately embodied in the populist leader.89 “As such, they are no longer conceived as an ordinary routine of democratic life marked by uncertainty but the opposite: they become a dramatic event, for an electoral defeat poses an existential challenge to a leader’s . . . claims to embody the people.”90 Thus elections in the populist symbolic universe are about acclaim and blind deference to the populist leader instead of serving to ensure accountability in light of critical assessment of populist government’s policies. Indeed the populist conception of “real” or “radical” democracy as unlimited majoritarianism has its foundation in a symbolic conception of the political in which unity of the true people’s will as the popular sovereign is incarnated by their sovereign representative leader who embodies them and is the custodian and definer of their and thus the nation’s interests. Presenting themselves as above established parties and organized interests (even when they capture an existing party) and as embodying the whole (real) nation, the sovereign representative implicitly accepts no limits.91 The populist leader in government purports to occupy the place of power and rejects social division within the true people, placing division and opposition as ultimately outside of the real nation but somehow always also as an internal threat to the people (be it in the shape of the deep state, the oligarchy, corrupt ties with alien powers, minorities, etc.).92 This undermines the symbolic order of a democratic society by hypostasizing and rendering mythological the ideal/​utopian dimension of the democratic imaginary—​the idea that the people are sovereign—​and pitting it against the principles of equality (freedom from discrimination) and individual freedom (from arbitrariness). Populism’s conception of democracy thus undermines its core presuppositions: namely social division within the people, acceptance of plurality and of opposition, and the contestation of power.93 If the populist incarnation of the people is in power, contestation against this rather paternal and Hobbesian figure is not acceptable.94 Hence the marked tendency of every populist executive in government to manipulate the electoral playing field. As Huq and Ginsburg note, a mix of legislative measures, politicized law-​enforcement discretion, corruption, and barely cloaked dog-​whistles inviting outright violence are standard.95 The examples are numerous. Extreme partisan gerrymandering, manipulation of registration, voting times, and ballot-​access rules, denunciation of democratic local or regional executives, baseless accusations of voter fraud risks in voting by mail,

Populist Governments and Their Logic  129 and other techniques to diminish turnout that might favor democrats, typical of Tea Party Republican populists in power in the various states and of Trump’s presidency, aim at a one party lock up of the democratic process. So do Orbán’s Fidesz party’s use of its legislative control over the electoral system to enact measures making it easier to turn a plurality into a two-​third governing majority in Hungary, similar to the various measures taken by Chavez in Venezuela, and comparable ones put in place by Erdogan in Turkey.96 Taken together all such moves pervert, without openly abolishing many of the formal procedural principles of democracy. But they do certainly contribute to democratic backsliding, defined as “the state-​led debilitation or elimination of any of the political institutions that sustain an existing democracy.”97 So do the attacks on civil society. We have noted the clash of populist movements with the pluralistic and self-​limiting principles of civil society insofar as they frame political conflict in terms of a friend–​enemy discourse regarding other groups and counter movements and associations. Populist politics is perforce identity politics that plays on fostering antagonism, affect, and strongly cathected identifications that divide society into two camps (us vs. them), personalize disagreement, and foster segmented, stacked political identities across which it becomes nearly impossible to discuss, cooperate, or compromise in an inclusive manner. Populist parties and leaders in government, in addition to rejecting plurality and self-​limitation and exacerbating polarizing identity politics, attack the two other key principles of civil society: publicity and free association. They do so by degrading the public sphere and by undermining basic rights, in particular of minorities and the opposition. The degradation of the public sphere is the most obvious, as the populist playbook invariably includes attacks on independent media, undermining the autonomy of independent experts be they scientific, legal, or otherwise, distortion of the truth, and efforts to undermine access to reliable information through outright lying or sowing of distrust, defunding of opposition media, and support of fake news mongers all of which are tantamount to undermining the minimal epistemic prerequisites for democratic judgment. Indeed as Huq and Ginsburg note, lack of accurate information about the government’s policy facilitates erroneous judgments as well as grave violations of individual rights by government as a means of garnering public support and eliminating dissent form the public sphere and dissenting minorities from the electorate. Examples abound, including the 2000 Chavez government media law, the long campaign in Turkey against journalists accelerated by the post-​coup closure of a hundred media outlets in 2016, Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the veracity of independent news outlets from the New York Times and Washington Post to CNN, Orbán’s increasing control of the media in Hungary, etc. Targeting independent journalists, lawyers, voluntary associations, NGOs, foundations and universities are part and parcel of all this use of discriminatory

130  Populism and Civil Society legalism against independent opposition groups and whistle blowers in civil society.98 Last but hardly least, there are the efforts of populists in government to distort the function of counter-​democratic institutions. Indeed in his prescient analysis, Rosanvallon defines populism as “a pathology of counter-​democracy,” as indicated earlier.99 Populism involves pathologies of oversight and vigilance, of negative sovereignty, and of the politics of judgment. It distorts oversight and vigilance into compulsive and permanent distrust of political elites and established authorities and institutions; it turns critical sovereignty and preventive power into a dynamic of pure negativity toward politics and government; and finally it distorts the civilian function of judgment into a paranoid paroxysm of accusation and denunciation.100 But these tactics are not reserved for populist movements or parties out of power, as Rosanvallon implies. Paradoxically, populists in government exacerbate the tendencies inherent in counter-​democracy and reproduce them in their own rhetoric through constant incrimination of non-​populist government officials, institutions, and counter-​powers, denying their own responsibility for failures, blaming, e.g., the deep state or allegedly disloyal officials in the bureaucracy and courts or politicians in the legislature. Populists in government thrive on divisiveness and distrust toward non-​populist political and administrative office holders. Thus even when they are in government, even when they control the executive power, they trigger extreme counter-​democratic suspicion and distrust of government and of expertise, while undermining the trust necessary for democracy. This facilitates and justifies repression, stigmatization, and denial of basic rights to minorities and to other authorities and their supporters (whistle blowers, etc.) once populism becomes “the” government.

Populist Government I: Qualified Authoritarianism? Populists “in” government and populism as “the” government share a common goal based on their hostility to all separation, division, and differentiation of powers: in both cases they seek to undermine the independence of the political branches that could check their power and in addition try to delegitimize autonomous media, movements, minorities, and the opposition in civil and political society, as well as the state administration. Once they become “the” government, populist executives are better equipped to accomplish these tasks, and they do so by coopting officials, harassing opponents, and instituting legal and constitutional changes that, while not abolishing elections or outlawing the independent party-​political opposition, severely diminish their chances of successfully challenging them. Moreover populists as the government have more powers available to them to undermine the autonomy of state institutions and eviscerate or

Populist Governments and Their Logic  131 politicize them. The move from attacks on the other branches of government to attacks on the state by populists as the government is a sign that the threshold from a democratic to another hybrid regime type is being crossed. Thus it is justified to consider populism as “the” government on the regime level, though in our view the verdict that it is a new hybrid regime should not be announced prematurely. As we have argued, the process of democratic hybridization entails the introduction of authoritarian norms, practices, and procedures into a democratic regime, with the aim of skewing the electoral playing field, undermining the opposition’s ability to compete, and diminishing the likelihood that existing institutions can serve as checks on populist power grabs. This involves a piecemeal and slow process so long as populists control only the executive. But once they become “the” government, populists tend to shift from quantity to quality, up the ante, and do their best to speed things up. Now populist government facilitates the shift over to a new populist hybrid regime. The question then becomes how long one can speak merely of a lower quality democracy and partial democratic backsliding, instead of wholesale “constitutional retrogression” such that the threshold between democracy and the hybrid regime type is crossed. Indeed we disagree with those who want to situate the regime type populist governments erect as qualified democracies, illiberal, or electoral, but also with those who see populism in government and even populism as the government as outright unabashed authoritarianism or autocracy.101 Instead of viewing the form constructed by populist government as a qualified democracy or as a qualified authoritarian regime, we argue that populist governments constitute a distinct hybrid regime that wields together elements from democracy and authoritarianism but is in effect neither one nor the other.102 As we shall see, there can be a variety of hybrid regimes, and the populist hybrid differs from other hybrids in its genesis and dynamics. But it also must be differentiated from full-​ scale authoritarian regimes and outright dictatorships although it certainly can take the road toward those sorts of regime over time.103 The hybrid regime that populist government creates is as distinct from democratic and full authoritarian regimes as a mule is from a horse and a donkey notwithstanding the features it borrows from both. The idea of a hybrid regime combining democratic and authoritarian elements is not new, as Larry Diamond pointed out some time ago.104 Nevertheless, there is still some conceptual confusion about the analytic concept of a hybrid regime as a distinct political form in its own right.105 It is thus worth looking at the theory of competitive authoritarianism as a distinctive hybrid regime type. This concept marked an important break with those versions of the transitions literature of the 1990s that construed the introduction of competitive elections (in which power holders could and sometimes did lose power) and some civil

132  Populism and Civil Society freedoms into post–​Cold War authoritarian contexts as “hybridization.” By this many authors meant or implied that the regimes thus produced were “merely” transitional—​temporary steps taken en route to democracy or destined to fall back into dictatorship.106 The theory of competitive authoritarianism helpfully developed the idea of a hybrid regime type as a stable, not simply transitional, political form with a variety of subtypes (depending on the specific combination of elections, civil and political freedoms, and authoritarian elements) at the center of the analysis. But confusingly the authors construe the hybrid that is “competitive authoritarianism” as another subtype of authoritarian regimes adding to existing varieties analyzed by Juan Linz.107 Thus competitive authoritarianism is deemed to be a new and distinctive subtype of authoritarianism that is the product of the contemporary world and which can endure. Competitive authoritarian regimes are civilian regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist and are widely viewed as the primary means of gaining power, but in which incumbents’ abuse of the state places them at a significant advantage vis-​à-​vis their opponents. Such regimes are competitive in that opposition parties use democratic institutions to contest seriously for power, but they are not democratic because the playing field is heavily skewed in favor of incumbents. Competition is thus real but unfair.108

Accordingly, this is supposed to be a subtype of authoritarianism that has important elements of democracy.109 The opposition in these regimes, as indicated, is able to make use of “democratic institutions” to participate in competitive elections.110 Another term for such regimes introduced by Andreas Schedler is “electoral authoritarianism”—​a concept that entails elections in a regime that is minimally pluralist, minimally open, minimally competitive but in which opposition parties are ultimately denied victory.111 This version is broader than competitive authoritarianism insofar as it captures hegemonic regimes, but it does not serve us well in differentiating between regimes with sham elections and those in which the opposition really does have a chance to compete and win. “Competitive authoritarianism” as a distinct subtype of “hybrid” authoritarian regimes is more illuminating in that regard and also insofar as it is a subtype quite different from the seven closed varieties analyzed by Linz in his earlier work.112 It is clear that the concept aims to show that the regimes it characterizes cannot be situated in the frame of democracy, however qualified, because, in one interpretation, they violate three defining attributes of democratic competition: (1) free and fully fair elections, including a reasonably level playing field; (2) broad protection of civil liberties; and (3) rule of law.113 Of course, in another plausible interpretation, a sufficiently severe violation of any of these reduces the other two to formalism without substance. Thus, some authors follow Linz, who in

Populist Governments and Their Logic  133 his new 2000 introduction to his classic 1985 Breakdown of Democratic Regimes argues that when regimes violate the first or second of these democratic norms of competition severely it makes no sense to classify them as democracies.114 In this interpretation the democratic/​authoritarian threshold is easier to locate, since one can say with some certainty in any given case that there are no longer free elections or that civil liberties are no longer protected. It is more difficult to do the same when all three violations are taking place slowly but incrementally, reinforcing one another.115 Tentatively, as we will argue later, the threshold for regime change from democracy to a hybrid (as distinct from the degradation of the quality of democracy) is either the simultaneous violation of all three attributes just mentioned or the sufficiently severe violation of one of them that neutralizes the democratic function of the others. This way of conceiving the matter allows for a spectrum of democratic regimes where incremental backsliding toward authoritarianism has taken place and are thus imperfect in their satisfaction of their own norms, while indicating the difference of all of them from authoritarian hybrids. But in this context at least we clearly break with the approach of O’Donnell whose idea of “delegative democracies” that entitle the executive to govern as he or she sees fit does point to a hybrid form that violates the norms of protection of civil liberties and a level playing field, but who nevertheless classified these as democracies, supposedly (!) more “democratic” than liberal versions.116 While the concept of delegative democracy is not limited to populism in power, it certainly seems to describe what populists aim at and often achieve when successful in electoral competition. But does populist governmental power still fall within the democratic spectrum, or do populists whether “in” or “the” government transgress the threshold of a democratic regime? Certainly, the charge of the violation of one or all three norms of democratic competition to greater or lesser degree does seem to apply empirically in many cases where a populist party achieves governmental power. Thus Levitsky and Way argue that populist governments often construct the hybrid subtype of competitive authoritarianism they have in mind. While helpfully showing that the relevant polities cannot be classified as a subtype of a democratic regime (because free elections with a reasonably level playing field are lacking as are broad protections of civil liberties and rule of law), the concept of competitive authoritarianism leads to confusion, because it seems to classify the regimes they describe under the genus of authoritarian regimes, as the name “competitive authoritarianism” implies, thereby obscuring the analytic distinctiveness of a hybrid regime and losing sight of another important threshold, between the hybrid regime and the full authoritarian type. That second threshold is especially significant when the backsliding and the transition are from a democratic regime.

134  Populism and Civil Society We thus need to confront two issues directly. It is obvious that we are using the concept of a hybrid populist regime in a different genetic context from that which the concept of hybrid regimes was devised to address.117 Instead of the transition from closed to open authoritarian regimes, along with others we are analyzing the transition (breakdown?) of democratic regimes, in consolidated as well as in relatively new democracies, to a new hybrid regime type. We call the latter populist hybrid regime to distinguish it from another hybrid form, competitive authoritarianism that was more relevant to the transitions from authoritarian rule.118 We focus on the role populist governments play in such transitions.119 It thus behooves us to look into the processes and devices used by populists as the government to contribute to regime change, addressing in more detail the threshold question. Second, it is important to revisit the debate over how to classify the regimes that populist governments create, if they are able to, for the theoretical and political stakes are high. We see hybrid regimes as a genus with various subtypes one of which is the populist version with its distinctive genesis and logic.

The Threshold Issue We have already identified the key characteristics of populist government that have an elective affinity with authoritarianism. Levitsky and Loxton’s study identified three reasons why populist executives push new democracies with relatively weak states, democratic institutions, and parties into a new hybrid regime type, that we wish to call a populist hybrid regime.120 We distinguish this type from competitive authoritarianism because of its origins as well as forms of justification. First, populist executives position themselves as outsiders and mobilize mass support through anti-​establishment appeals. For the most part they have little experience with or commitment to the institutions of representative democracy. Unlike career politicians working in legislatures or local governments, they typically do not acquire the skills of negotiation or coalition building needed to make those institutions work.121 Fujimori, Chavez, Gutierrez, and Correa never held elective office before winning the presidency and were political amateurs. Second, the mandate of populist governments was won on the message of burying the political elite and “replacing the establishment.” The existing regime institutions are denounced as not really democratic: horizontal accountability is interpreted as undemocratic limitation. Thus emerge projects to destroy the parties, legislatures, and judiciaries that are allegedly “corrupt.”122 Admittedly, one could see the rise to power of the respective populist leaders in many contexts as responses to the deficiencies of delegative democracy. But populists rarely call for greater horizontal accountability as the corrective to

Populist Governments and Their Logic  135 delegative democracy. Their plebiscitary antidote, even if often mixed with direct democratic elements and claims, is to change the leader or leadership to which electoral power is delegated. Third, populist leaders in government don’t do away with representation or elections when they shift the government toward a hybrid populist regime, but as we have argued, they severely distort them, purporting to institute a form of direct representation through acclaim, embodiment, and identification of “the people” with the leader. The personalistic linkage populists establish with voters constructs the populist executive as the only valid representative/​embodiment of “the people’s will.”123 Accordingly the populist president asserts a mandate to assault existing democratic institutions and when necessary and possible to refound the political system using whatever legal institutional means available to do so.124 This facilitates the step toward a full-​fledged populist government and the possible emergence of a hybrid populist (democratic-​ authoritarian) regime type.125 The necessity has to do with the existence of forms of separation, and division of power (as well as influence), among political branches, center, and units under federal systems, government and the public sphere, state, and civil society, as well as state and government. These forms of differentiation are different and depend on the relations of forces in different settings. The separation of powers is key, since if a populism seeks to challenge and reduce the other forms of political plurality, it is from the vantage point of fully united government, or populism as “the” government, that the several tasks can be accomplished. Here is where the well-​documented interest of populists in constitutional politics (a topic we will consider in detail in c­ hapter 4) becomes necessary and is legitimated by populist attacks on previous establishments. But even this takes different forms in alternative settings. Under presidential governments, the antagonist of populist executives within the separation of powers is most often the legislature. This was the case for outsider presidents initially in Venezuela, who did not control the inherited legislature, in Peru and Ecuador, where the populist presidential candidates did not even have parties that could win elections at the same time as their own initial plebiscitary victory, or again in Venezuela after lost legislative elections. It is in settings of this type that new constitution making, involving the election of a constituent assembly as a counter-​legislature, became useful, with the project of producing a more (or even more) plebiscitary constitution as the frame for a delegative democracy. Under parliamentary government, as in Turkey, Hungary, and Poland, the main antagonist within the separation of powers was the constitutional court. Here too, as the Hungarian case with the earlier failure of the final liberal constitution shows, the making of a new constitution was an attractive option on the symbolic level. But in parliamentary settings, as the Polish and Turkish cases show, there are alternatives such as court

136  Populism and Civil Society packing and the repeated use of amendments that can accomplish less formal or more incremental changes of constitutional identity. Unfortunately, even the making of a new constitution, the passing of comprehensive amendments, or the success in court packing are only formal signposts for the interest in establishing a new, hybrid regime. The difference between formal constitution and regime (=material constitution) is fundamental; fully replacing one is not the same as completely changing the other. This difference is indicated by the survival of formal separation of powers and traditional rights in many populist constitutions, as well as the repeated recourse to the various alternative avenues of constitutional politics both before and after the making of new constitutions as in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Hungary. Aside from court packing and repeated amendments, the statutory bypassing of formal amendments all involve iterated tampering with regime structure. Given the “stealth nature” of many of the constitutional changes,126 it is thus not possible to pinpoint precisely when the threshold is crossed from a populist government that can still be deemed, even if minimally, democratic, to an albeit open and new type of hybrid populist regime. But we should be able to recognize the signs that this is happening. To be clear, there are not one but two thresholds at issue regarding populists as the government: one pertains to the shift to a hybrid populist (democratic-​authoritarian) regime, the other to full authoritarianism or dictatorship, in which the democratic institutions remaining have been turned into a pure sham. Here we focus on the first threshold—​the shift to a hybrid populist regime. One important sign can be discerned when incremental negative changes in the three basic predicates of democracy—​free and fully competitive elections, rights to speech and association, and the rule of law—​become substantial and significantly coalesce so that the system-​level quality of democratic contestation is undermined and constitutional retrogression turns into what is tantamount to a shift in regime type.127 According to Huq and Ginsburg, the end state of constitutional retrogression would be tantamount to regime change: toward some sort of hybrid that uses the democratic electoral form but involves qualitative changes in the legal and political system of constitutional democracy so that they can no longer be seen as democratic.128 Another important indication is the systematic violation of the basic norms of mutual toleration and constitutional forbearance on the part of the government.129 Indeed, the role of populist governments enjoying near unchecked control over the state apparatus, and backed by referendum victories and majorities in newly elected constituent assemblies, in triggering regime change through the use of plebiscitary strategies has been well documented.130 When populist governments purge the judiciary, appoint loyalists to head the electoral authorities and other key institutions such as the security apparatuses and administrative bureaucracy, politicizing them

Populist Governments and Their Logic  137 and undermining their autonomy, when they close parliaments and impose new constitutional rules of the game in order to retain and expand power, all the while maintaining elections and some political pluralism, their government veers off the map of constitutional democracy.131 The shift in the meaning of elections and party pluralism from an aggregative choice mechanism oriented to responsible and responsive government, to election and party membership as a mechanism of confirming identity and identification is another clear sign of transition. Equally important is the attack on the autonomy of state institutions ranging from administrative bureaucracies to local governments to independent prosecutors and the judiciary in general to the security services. Populists as the government seek to render these compliant and dependent. To the extent to which they succeed in politicizing state agencies either by replacing independent office holders with clientelism, patrimonialism, and corruption or via fear tactics, the steps toward creating a dual state in which the prerogative power of the populist executive trumps the normative legal order clearly indicate the authoritarian nature/​project of the government.132 Well-​functioning institutions of consolidated democracies that create a virtuous circle of cooperation, compromise, oversight, fairness, non-​arbitrariness, and responsiveness are systematically undermined, replaced by informal practices of clientelism and corruption and overall arbitrariness. Last but hardly least, the threshold has most likely been crossed to a new hybrid populist regime when the attack by relatively entrenched populist governments against independent apex courts ceases: for this occurs only when such a body entirely loses its independence and the ability to act independently.133 It is important to be clear on this last point. The attack on apex courts reveals much about the logic of populist government.134 Apex courts, from a democratic point of view, guard the differentiation (separation and division) of powers, none of which has the right to monopolize speaking in the name of the popular sovereign. Indeed, as we argued earlier, Lefort’s concept of the empty space of power as constitutive of democracy precludes any institution or group purporting to embody or incarnate the popular sovereign and thus to occupy that space under the mantle of democracy. While populists interpret popular sovereignty and the constituent power in terms of incarnation, the role of apex courts is to distinguish between the democratic constituent power and the constitutionally delegated (constituted) powers of executive and legislatives. Since the Indian Basic Structure and Colombian Replacement doctrines, we have become increasingly accustomed to the differentiation of even the amending and constituent powers that an apex court can enforce through amendment review.135 Where an amendment rule is multi-​leveled, courts logically assume the role of policing this type of differentiation as well. And as they did in the South African constitution-​making process, courts may even have a role to play in the making of new constitutions.

138  Populism and Civil Society The point is that these procedures guarding differentiation replace “the people” as an entity (itself a myth) and the idea of its embodiment in a person or institution, and with ascending levels of democratic legitimacy. Obviously courts also play key roles in the defense of individual and minority rights, their so-​called liberal function. But the two functions are related, as we argued earlier in defining democracy: Only by defending the separation of powers and the differentiation of constituent and constituted can the rights of individuals and minorities be protected against executive or legislative violation and usurpation as well as constitutional abrogation. Populist government, given its interpretation of popular sovereignty, must resist these forms of power limitation and any agency seeking to enforce it. By identifying the genuine people’s will with its own, the populist government sees intervention of the courts as the secret work of an enemy—​ the deep state or some external power or domestic “alien” group—​even when populists control the main state institutions. Once the will is incarnated there is no reason to move to other levels of legitimacy and to alternative procedures to test whether it is a democratic will.136 The harm of this to democracy should be obvious. Populist government even short of establishing a new hybrid regime seeks to make the judiciary the pliant tool of the executive, unable to police the separation of powers, the democratic nature of procedures, or to defend the rights of individuals and minorities. Once judicial independence is abrogated through reiterated rounds of packing and jurisdiction weakening, even the possibility of policing the fairness and freedom of elections is lost. It is thus astonishing to see a debate emerge over whether the new hybrid regime created by populist governments through this route should be deemed a distinct type of non-​liberal democracy rather than a new hybrid regime (neither democratic nor authoritarian). We will argue that the very debate signals the rhetorical success of populist governments in papering over their transformation out of a democratic regime, by labeling themselves “illiberal democracies,” and that analysts should not fall into this trap.

Populist Government II: Illiberal Democracy? It should be unsurprising that populist executives who gain control of government portray their regime as a superior form of democracy—​recall Victor Orbán’s infamous implication that Hungary is an “illiberal democracy”—​meaning that it now enjoys majority rule and governmental embodiment of the real people’s will unhindered by “undemocratic” liberal limits.137 Of course this statement was meant both as a prescriptive (regarding intent) and descriptive statement of what a populist regime is or should be.138 But for 21st century analysts and academics to embrace either the concept of illiberal democracy or to apply that

Populist Governments and Their Logic  139 classification to contemporary populist governments and the regimes they have established or are close to establishing, is astounding. Indeed, as already indicated, the development of the concepts of competitive and/​or electoral authoritarianism at the end of the last century sought to debunk the democratic claims of governments that transitioned from closed to open authoritarianism (competitive/​electoral/​hegemonic). They developed illuminating analyses of the new type of hybrid regimes (or for Schedler new authoritarianism) that, despite their acceptance of some political plurality and competitive albeit neither free nor fair elections, remained authoritarian. Thus, the reversion to the moniker of qualified democracy by contemporary analysts of populist governments that emerge in democratic regimes, in the face of the fundamental changes described earlier, seems a step backward from analytical sophistication to the simplistic equations of democracy with elections and majority rule. We contend that, in particular, the concept of illiberal or non-​liberal democracy, the most prevalent moniker, is both theoretically flawed and often ideologically motivated whether it refers to right-​wing or left-​wing populist regimes. The historical progeny and the theoretical cogency of the idea of illiberal democracy are well worth re-​examining (see the following subsection). It is also worth the effort to specify what is distinctive about the alternative: the concept of a new hybrid regime we call populist democratic-​authoritarian, as a subtype (discussed in the following subsection).

The Concept of Illiberal Democracy The theoretical core, if not the actual formulation, of the concept of “illiberal democracy” can be traced back to Carl Schmitt.139 Drawing on the well-​known fact that liberalism and democracy stem from distinct traditions and that in the 19th century many European liberals rejected universal suffrage and thus democratization, Schmitt argued that the core principles and basic institutions of democracy and liberalism are distinct and antithetical.140 Accordingly, liberalism is about liberty—​freedom from government. It is theoretically linked, allegedly, to a conception of freedom as negative liberty, philosophically to moral universalism, historically to parliamentarism, and institutionally to fundamental, liberal, individual rights (speech, assembly, religion, property), constitutionalism, the separation of powers, the rule of law, and other devices necessary to limit government.141 Democracy is, by contrast according to Schmitt, about equality, identity, popular sovereignty, and the self-​rule of the people via their chosen representative who embodies their will. Equality is interpreted to mean sameness along some salient line (values, race, religion, nationality, etc.), for only equals (those like us) can be equal; popular sovereignty is interpreted to mean the direct unrestricted rule of the homogeneous people’s unitary will in government. Accordingly, democracy entails the accumulation of power and its use by a strong central state. For right-​wing populist theorists like Schmitt and contemporary

140  Populism and Civil Society left populist theorists like Laclau and Mouffe, democracy is thus a form of identity politics ultimately based on an exclusionary conception of equality, because those who are not the same, or who disagree with the alleged people’s will, cannot really be part of the people or the popular sovereign.142 Thus the equality/​difference dichotomy and identity politics (oriented to forging the identity of the democratic political subject and its homogeneous will and identification with a leader embodying that will) are at the heart of the political strategy of populism in and out of power and of the friend–​enemy logic that lurks underneath all politics according to populist theory, permitting the requisite exclusions and elimination of those who are not the same from the demos.143 Schmitt’s attack on liberalism and his insistence on separating it from democracy had of course the purpose of excising deliberation, limits, liberties, compromise, the acceptance of disagreement, the public sphere, and the institutional embodiment of all this at the time—​parliamentary government—​from the concept of democracy.144 The strategy was to denounce all of these as merely liberal and apolitical and to reduce democratic politics to identity politics, i.e., to the processes of identifying those who are equals, the real people, ensuring their identification with one another and their acclaim of the leader who incarnates their will and identity.145 For Schmitt this could but need not entail competitive elections. But identity politics and the dynamics inherent in the populist conception of “democracy” oriented to referenda, plebiscites, or plebiscitary elections, is, of course the populist core of his theory. It led to his insistence that democracy has more in common with dictatorship than with political liberalism.146 Indeed, the very concept of discursive deliberative public spheres—​in civil society and in parliament—​is placed by Schmitt in the box of liberalism rather than democracy, enabling him to claim that bypassing or even abolishing parliament and basic rights guaranteeing speech and association is democratic.147 Thus Schmitt revived and endorsed the impulses toward Bonapartism so prevalent in 19th century populism, in order to block what he saw as the inevitable instability that democratization of the suffrage, rights (including social rights), parties, and parliaments created, by importing too much of “society” and liberalism into the state.148 He endorsed democratic legitimacy without liberalism but did so by trading on their diverse and conflicted historical genesis—​not by analyzing the structural features of a democratic constitutionalist regime, which, as we argue, entails the indissoluble imbrication of the two. This allowed him to claim democratic legitimacy for dictatorships of the left and right variety.149 The concept of illiberal democracy re-​emerged in the 1990s, this time to address the transitions from authoritarian regimes that entailed the introduction of competitive elections and some political rights but not the full array of civil and political liberties or institutions entailed by representative (constitutional) democracy. The first to develop this idea (if not the actual concept of illiberal

Populist Governments and Their Logic  141 democracy) was Guillermo O’Donell in the article referred to earlier, focused primarily on Latin America.150 As already noted, O’Donell’s term for the hybrid regimes that were created was “delegative democracy.” But apart from its influence on Latin Americanists, the concept had little impact elsewhere. By contrast, the term “illiberal democracy,” coined a few years later by Fareed Zakaria to conceptualize the structure of apparently consolidated regimes that entail democratic procedures for selecting government but which nonetheless violate key civil and political liberties, has become far more widespread and influential.151 “Illiberal democracy” is a “form of government that mixes a substantial degree of democracy with a substantial degree of illiberalism.”152 This analysis, too, draws on the historically distinct genesis of liberalism and democracy and on the conceptual distinction between procedures for selecting government—​ democratic if based on minimally open elections and broad enfranchisement; and government’s overarching or purpose—​liberal if oriented to the protection of personal liberty, limitation of power, and the rule of law.153 Accordingly, illiberal democracies must be deemed to be democratic regimes even if they are severely deficient regarding rights, freedoms, equality, and powers and usurp the prerogatives of both horizontal (other branches of national government) and some vertical (regional, local authorities, nongovernmental groups, private business) elements of society.154 This includes regimes that centralize governmental authority in the hands of executives, often by extra constitutional means, and that, by claiming to represent the people, encroach on the powers and violate the rights of key social groups—​an analysis that obviously pertains to many populist regimes then and now.155 But one might well note: “If a democracy does not preserve liberty and law, that it is a democracy is small consolation.”156 Obviously, the main alternatives to this categorization of the relevant regimes have been the theories of hybrid regimes (competitive authoritarianism) or of the new authoritarianism described earlier. Indeed, the relevant authors—​Levitsky, Way, Schedler—​as we have seen, roundly criticized the “qualified democracy” approach as operating with an overly minimal, electoralist conception of democracy and in the end playing into the hands of autocrats by legitimizing their authoritarian regimes with a democratic veneer. Whether one calls the relevant regimes “semi-​democracy,” “delegative democracy,” “virtual democracy,” “electoral democracy,” or “illiberal democracy,” such appellations are rejected by these authors either for assuming that hybrid regimes are transitional, having a democratizing bias, or for developing grab-​bag categories that inadequately distinguish among the variety of mixes of authoritarian and democratic features and the different implications these may have for economic performance, human rights, and prospects for democracy.157 Indeed Zakaria himself notes that these regimes are not transitional, i.e., not en route to democracy. Thus it seems to make more sense, as Juan Linz noted in this new introduction to Totalitarianism

142  Populism and Civil Society and Authoritarian Regimes, to include them in the “variety of authoritarianisms” rather than the “variety of democracies” box.158 But as we have argued, following in the spirit if not the actual taxonomy of Levitsky and Way, the concept of a hybrid regime as a genus distinct from both democratic and authoritarian regimes is superior to both approaches, because it allows one to get at the specific dynamics and constraints of the particular blend of democratic and authoritarian elements in the specific hybrid subtype: for us, the populist one. Otherwise the threshold between deficient democracies (all democracies have deficits and could be further democratized) and hybrid non-​democracies and between these and the variety of however diminished authoritarian regimes and the relevant types of protest and resistance that could be constructive in each, gets blurred. But we must analyze and challenge the theoretical core at the heart of the concept of illiberal democracy because it is again being taken up, this time by theorists of populism construed as part of a project to democratize really existing liberal democracies, that blames their liberal elements and orientation for their democratic deficits.159 This is a dangerous move because, as we have shown, while the populist critiques of the democratic deficits in really existing democracies often hit their mark, the reasons for these deficits cannot be placed at the door of political liberalism. Efforts to disaggregate liberalism from democracy in order to “radicalize” the latter will only lead to authoritarianism, not to a higher quality of democracy. The clearest statement of this misguided approach is the recent work of Chantal Mouffe, a theorist with some influence in European left populist political and theoretical circles.160 To be sure, in her recent writings, Mouffe seems to embrace liberal democracy, apparently tempering her strong Schmittian analysis of the deeply contradictory nature of its component parts in her 2005 book The Democratic Paradox.161 Indeed in For a Left Populism, Mouffe claims that she wishes to deepen and radicalize the values of freedom and equality inherent in liberal constitutional democracy, rather than to support a revolutionary break with it.162 She argues that the aim of populist strategy is to construct a collective subject able to forge a new hegemonic formation within the liberal democratic order, not to create a new populist regime.163 But she drops only the idea, endorsed in the earlier text, that pluralist liberal democracy must self-​destruct, not the claim that these two traditions are ultimately irreconcilable.164 The so-​ called paradox remains, defined as the unavoidable tension and conflict (contradiction quand même) between liberty and rights on the one side, democratic equality and popular sovereignty on the other.165 Perhaps she is motivated to affirm her allegiance to liberal democracy (which she spent most of her life criticizing) thanks to the adoption by right-​wing populist leaders such as Orbán and Kaczynski of the term “illiberal democracy” to describe their regimes. No defender of right-​wing populist regimes, Mouffe is indubitably sincere about

Populist Governments and Their Logic  143 her left populist project of defending and radicalizing liberal democracy. But her populist theory undermines her political commitments. The error lies in the never abandoned first step, namely, falling for Schmitt’s rhetorical trick of deeming not freedom but equality (as identity, sameness, and identification) as democracy’s core and thus implicitly reserving popular sovereignty and equality to equals while construing liberalism as depoliticizing and unnecessarily limiting of the will and prerogatives of the people’s representatives in power. Indeed her analysis of liberal democracy is confused and contradictory due to both her left over Schmittian and continued populist commitments. On her account too, liberalism is wed to abstract universalism and individualistic human rights, i.e., to individual liberty, and thus is supposedly in constitutive tension with democracy whose central ideas are popular sovereignty and equality construed along Schmittian lines. Democracy’s grammar, according to Mouffe, requires the construction of the people (the demos) as an identity and a frontier between a “we” and a “they” conflicting with universalism.166 But she advises us to endorse liberal logic because it enables challenges to the forms of exclusion inherent in democracy—​challenges made by those subject to the law of the demos and demanding full inclusion as equal citizens. So equality now shifts over to liberalism’s side.167 Presumably it now means equal liberty. And yet she bewails the disappearance of agonistic politics and projects of society that could challenge depriving citizens of the possibility of exercising their democratic rights (so rights are part of democracy too), and she blames political liberalism for this!168 Democracy, she insists, has been reduced to its liberal component that allegedly entails only free elections and the defense of human rights, denying the demos its voice and agonistic political role and turning it into “post-​democracy.”169 One can easily trace some of these confusions to her concept of agonistic democracy contrived as an alternative to liberal, communicative, deliberative, or aggregative models, as if these do not involve dissent, contestation, partisanship, and various civil forms of participation, social movements, and conflict, including civil disobedience. Indeed if we drop the caricature of these other models, it is unclear what agonism, on its own, adds. But it is clear what role it plays in populism. We contend that agonism, wed to her populist theory and strategy, entails, despite disclaimers, a conception of “the political” as a friend–​ enemy logic of antagonistic identity (and difference) formation even though Mouffe, unlike Laclau whose theory she endorses, repeatedly tries to retreat from this. Her leftover Schmittianism not only continues to inform her analysis of liberalism, it structures her concept of “radical” democracy as well insofar as she sees democratic will formation as a process of identity formation (constructing who is the people and identification with a leader) rather than as a process of articulating opinions, aggregating interests, deliberation among multiple actors

144  Populism and Civil Society debating over positions and goals, convincing one another or agreeing to disagree until the next election, and so forth. Populist identity politics makes political conflict turn on whether you are for or against the people, not on serious debate about political projects or policies. Moreover, her theoretical conception of the tension between liberalism and democracy also involves much rhetorical slippage between political and economic liberalism, despite disavowals of the identity between the two. Mouffe repeatedly states that liberal and democratic principles have always been at loggerheads, observing that “liberal individualism” was kept in check in the epoch of the Keynesian welfare state by social democratic practices.170 By implication, liberal individualism is still equated with the egoism of the market-​ oriented person and with economic liberalism. But the core premise of political liberalism is the intrinsic and equal moral worth of all individuals, not the possessive individualism, atomism, and egoism that undergird economic liberalism and neo-​liberalism. Indeed political liberalism assumes that “the social condition of living a free life is that one stand in relations of equality with others.”171 Political liberalism endorsed Keynesianism and other modes of state regulation of the capitalist economy to ensure the equal worth of liberty.172 Twentieth-​century political liberalism is known for embracing social rights, the regulatory state, and redistributive political economics in various forms.173 The target of the contemporary populist critique should be economic neo-​ liberalism, embraced by a variety of political elites, not liberalism tout court. But in Mouffe’s hands, the distinction between the premises of political and economic liberalism is elided.174 We need not belabor this further. Liberalism and democracy do stem from distinct traditions and in the 19th century many European liberals rejected universal suffrage and fully representative democracy, fearing that once the male working class got the vote, their representatives would come to power democratically and heavily tax private property or overthrow capitalism. The struggle for inclusion in the circle of rights (and for the suffrage) by workers, women, minorities, and migrants also involved the expansion of the conception of the sorts of rights needed to secure equal moral worth, and equal liberty, from civil and political to social rights, variously conceived, just what Schmitt opposed.175 Whether one characterizes these struggles and successful outcomes as expanding democratic equality or as liberal inclusion in the circle of rights doesn’t really matter much. For, despite Mouffe’s caricature of the Habermassian position on the co-​equivalence of democracy and rights (rights and popular sovereignty in his words), and despite her misrepresentation of political liberalism generally, the point is that we must today see the two as presupposing and inextricably imbricated into each other—​as a palimpsest.176 Indeed, if one wishes to situate oneself

Populist Governments and Their Logic  145 in Lefort’s political imaginary as Mouffe clearly does, then one must see rights and democracy as two sides of the same democratic imaginary, i.e., as indeterminate principles necessary to realize the value of freedom that undergirds each, while open to contestation about how they should be interpreted and institutionalized.177 Certainly tensions between liberal and democratic conceptions of rights and limits on majorities exist, but these are internal to any viable conception of representative constitutional democracy, given indeterminacy, and thus inevitable disagreement and contestation over the right mix and over policy is part of, not a hindrance to, democratic government. We repeat our claim that political liberalism enhances, it does not diminish, democracy. Today we should not need to qualify democracy with the moniker liberal as if these represent values that are external to each other. Pace Orbán and the very undemocratic populists in power on the right and on the left, it is “illiberal democracy” that is a contradiction in terms. Indeed characterizing democracy as identity politics oriented toward filling the empty space of power with a “representative” purporting to embody the people’s will is anathema to the Lefortian approach. Populist regimes, whether left or right, thanks to populist strategy and logic, want to reduce limits, checks and balances, and other mechanisms that slow down the enactment of the alleged will of the authentic people by their representatives and to pull apart liberal democracy by doing an end run around courts, constitutional protections of rights, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, framing them as anti-​democratic, liberal principles. But it is a theoretical error and a political mistake to label the hybrid regime sought or established by populist governments a form of democracy. A populist regime instead would be tantamount to a change in identity from democracy to a hybrid form mixing democratic and authoritarian elements. Let us return to this issue now.

The Populist Hybrid Regime If the concept of illiberal or non-​liberal democracy papers over the issue of regime change, the choice of classifying post-​democratic populist regimes under the heading of “competitive authoritarianism” is also problematic. As noted, the concept originally referred to a new type of authoritarian regime emerging out of more closed varieties. Initially populist governments were included without differentiation into the broad list of such regimes.178 More recently the concept has been applied also to the regimes populists in power tend to create once they become the government in democratic contexts.179 The argument in this literature is focused on why populist governments push weak democracies to morph into competitive authoritarian regimes.180 But no attempt was made to differentiate populist from other types of hybrid regimes.

146  Populism and Civil Society Instead, the originators of this concept deployed it to differentiate among several other types of hybrid regimes including constitutional oligarchies, exclusive republics that deny suffrage to a major segment of the adult population (e.g., Estonia and Latvia in the early 1990s); tutelary regimes in which elections are partially competitive but the power of elected governments is restrained by non-​ elected religious (Iran), military (e.g., Guatemala and Pakistan), or monarchic (Nepal in the1990s) authorities; and restricted or semi-​competitive democracies in which elections are free but a major party is banned (e. g., Argentina 1957–​ 1966, Turkey in the 1990s).181 The concept of competitive authoritarian regimes, thus, in our view is under-​differentiated, because we think the distinctions between populist and non-​populist versions of the genus—​hybrid regimes—​that combine democratic procedures of access to power with more or less authoritarian modes of exercising power matters analytically and politically. This is so apart from the classificatory problem inherent in the very concept of competitive authoritarianism that misleads one to think that a subtype of the genus of authoritarian regimes is at issue. Just as Juan Linz years ago usefully differentiated among seven subtypes of authoritarian regimes, with the purpose of analyzing their severity and potentials for reform, we now think that analyzing the specificity of populist hybrid regimes could be illuminating and useful on both counts. Just to be clear, our interest is in contemporary populist regimes created by populist governments that cross over the threshold of democracy into a new hybrid form with its own tensions and dynamics.182 We have discussed at length how we understand democracy and the contrast with competitive authoritarianism. It is worth briefly revisiting Juan Linz’s now classic approach to the concept of authoritarian regimes, so we can get at the similarities and distinctiveness of the populist hybrid. Linz focused on three criteria to differentiate regime types and among the subtypes of authoritarianism: the degree of monism vs. pluralism in the way power is exercised and organized; mobilization vs. de-​politicization of the citizenry, tolerated or fostered from above; and the centrality of ideologies vs. mentalities regarding legitimation.183 Linz’s typology identified three broad regime types: democratic, totalitarian, and authoritarian. Accordingly, authoritarian regimes are political systems with limited political pluralism, without an elaborate guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, yet without extensive or intensive political mobilization.184 They entail ill-​defined executive powers that extend the executive’s prerogative over other institutions (primacy of the prerogative state in Frankel’s terms. Despite toleration of limited pluralism (coalitions of supporters) and some opposition, the absence of institutional channels for the opposition to reach the masses and contest elections is standard. But there are important subtypes that vary according to the degrees of mobilization, pluralism, and mentality/​ideology. Levitsky and Way follow Linz in

Populist Governments and Their Logic  147 their definition of “full authoritarianism,” in which no viable channels exist for the opposition to contest legally for executive power, but they include both closed and hegemonic regimes in which formal democratic institutions exist on paper but are reduce to façade status in practice.185 More relevant among Linz’s seven subtypes for us is the mobilizational authoritarian regime type that emerged in post-​democratic societies.186 Linz is clearly thinking of Italy under Mussolini as the first example of such a regime and also of other fascist governments. Obviously, the context of their emergence differs greatly from the contemporary one. But the anti-​ liberal, anti-​ democratic, anti-​ parliamentary, mobilizational “populism” of fascism created a new form of authoritarianism, elements of which, despite the discrediting of outright fascism, have been revived.187 These regimes used new types of organization providing an opportunity for involvement and participation, developing styles of speech, dress, and performance that reflected the break with elitist or “bourgeois” establishment norms. Their purpose was to allow individuals to submerge in the collective in mass demonstrations whether mobilized from above or from below. Participation in plebiscitary acclamation also had the function of escaping the privatization typical of the other subtypes of authoritarianism. Indeed Linz sees Peronism as a form of populist authoritarianism with some fascist components and nationalist populism perhaps as a deviant case of fascism, but he also speaks of the populism of fascism.188 To be sure, the mobilizational authoritarian fascist regimes Linz analyzed were outright dictatorships that dispensed with elections and with any semblance of democracy once in power. Nor were they in the end particularly pragmatic, although certainly Mussolini moved in that direction, as did Franco by making key alliances with conservative groups in order to remain in power. Our point is not to dwell on the misleading identification of fascist and populist regimes. We see the former as fully authoritarian dictatorships and the latter as hybrid regimes, and not as a form of fascism. Instead, we wish to use the criteria Linz developed—​ mobilizational vs. de-​politicizing, the monist-​pluralist spectrum, and the ideological or mentality basis of populist elite behavior and mass appeal—​to assess the populist governments as hybrid regimes, rather than as variants of authoritarianism. For populist hybrid regimes also engage in top-​down mobilization (while sanctioning autonomous, especially critical, mobilization from below), create participatory avenues for “the people,” and use friend–​enemy propaganda to enhance their loyalty and to fire them up, although they rely more on mentalities than cognitively closed ideologies for these purposes. In effect we can identify important elements typical of the mobilizational authoritarian subtype in populist hybrid regimes. They also share many characteristics of the competitive authoritarian regime type analyzed by Levitsky and Way.189 As Levitsky and Way argue, informal institutions in these regimes play an important role given

148  Populism and Civil Society the disjuncture between formal democratic rules and actual behavior. Indeed informal mechanisms of control and coercion are critical to the survival of competitive authoritarian regimes given their maintenance of democratic formal architecture.190 Vote buying, ballot stuffing, manipulation of vote count, organized corruption such as bribery or blackmail, skewed patronage, legal discrimination, and privatized violence are all informal means by which authoritarian executives remain in power even in a competitive authoritarian regime where they could in principle lose an election and in some cases have. It is obvious nonetheless that there are inherent tensions in these hybrid regimes rooted in the coexistence of formal democratic rules and autocratic methods that create an inherent source of instability. Multi-​party elections and nominally independent legislatures, judiciaries, and media create opportunities for periodic challenges that may threaten the incumbent and regime.191 When the challenges become serious and incumbents lack sufficient public support, they may be regime threatening, inviting more egregious violation of democratic rules and escalation of authoritarian techniques, to ensure the government stays in power. But even if a particular executive loses power, succession need not be tantamount to regime change nor is the direction of regime change predetermined. Democratization is one possible outcome, but so is the development of dynamics and mechanisms to maintain the competitive authoritarian regime or to transition to a full, more complete, closed authoritarianism.192 We argue that similar tensions exist in populist hybrid regimes, but thanks to populist logic, they are stronger and deeper than in non-​populist hybrid subtypes. Both share the general dilemma outlined earlier regarding how to stay in power using authoritarian means while maintaining formal democratic rules and legitimacy. A populist regime is a distinctive hybrid that introduces enough authoritarian features into the democratic contexts in which it arises (typically under still, albeit minimally, democratic populist governments) that we must deem them to be post-​democratic. Yet populism, as we have argued, is constitutively dependent on democratic legitimacy, because it invokes the people’s sovereignty and purports to realize the true majority’s will in a real, albeit “non-​ liberal,” democracy. Populism thus cannot dispense with elections or vertical accountability, which allow the people to select and periodically acclaim their institutional embodiment, the populist executive, or to reject her/​him. But the authoritarian elements intrinsic to populism or, put differently, its peculiar conception of democracy (as purely majoritarian, as direct and unmediated acclaim based on cathected identification with the leader, and involving the primacy of politics aka the people’s will over law), undermine its democratic legitimacy in three distinctive ways. First, populist hybrid regimes, unlike the competitive authoritarian variant, are dependent on mobilization in civil society, but seek to

Populist Governments and Their Logic  149 control it from above: a risky proposition if one is not prepared to use real repression and violence toward movements and associations that mobilize against the populist hybrid regime. Autonomous movements and mobilizations give the lie to the populist claim of incarnating the people, for how can the people mobilize against their own incarnation in power? Populist governments seek to mobilize their civil society and party political base when and where the executive requires it—​indeed like the mobilizational authoritarianism described by Linz, a populist regime cannot dispense with avenues for participation and involvement for “the people” even when they would prefer civil privatism, for the democratic legitimacy they rely on requires this. Populist power elites need the acclaim that rallies, plebiscites, and other mobilization forms afford them to demonstrate that they have the people’s support. But mobilization is always Janus-​faced, and the forces mobilized can get out from under from the populist regime’s control, leading possibly to electoral loss and loss of social majority support, inviting violence and greater suppression of civil liberties and thus further undermining democratic legitimacy. Second, populist regimes have a strong tendency toward monism despite their acceptance of competitive elections, since only the populist party and leader in government can incarnate the true people and be considered really legitimate. The friend–​enemy logic of populism is as we have seen deeply polarizing. The polarized political system it generates ultimately denies legitimacy to the opposition, even when it is allowed to exist and participate electorally.193 Thus populist regimes put pressure on pluralist elements in political society and have a hard time sustaining cooperative relations with other forces. Third, while populism’s “thin ideology” is more like a mentality in Linz’s sense than a cognitively demanding and closed ideological belief system, it nonetheless has two features that distinguish it from the elite mentalities Linz had in mind that orient non-​populist competitive authoritarian regimes toward pragmatism and civil privatism. Populist executives tend not to be pragmatic even regarding their desire to remain in power perpetually, in part because they are less inclined to cooperate with other peer groups thanks to populism’s inherent monism and its embodiment model of representation. Populist governments seem to prefer cronyism and corruption (capitalist or “socialist” as in Hungary and Venezuela respectively) to cooperation with potential political allies. Its mobilizational dynamic forces populist executives to periodically appeal to the people, another factor undermining pragmatism. While populism itself is a thin ideology, populists typically rely on host ideologies (of the right such as racialized nationalism and/​or religion, of the left such as socialism, or some combination of both as in anti-​imperialist socialism) to acquire and retain power. The populist hybrid regime is flexible ideologically in that it is never tied to a program, specific policies, or deep commitments to

150  Populism and Civil Society values: opportunism rather than principle orients it. Nonetheless, it is oriented in part by whatever host ideology it adheres to so that populist governments tend to make promises they cannot keep (outbidding) in part to fire up their base and to retain allegiance even though the populist elites in power are ultimately uncommitted to any core principles. If we add to all this the primacy of politics over law and evisceration of the rule of law inherent in populism, it becomes clear that hybrid populist regimes perforce distort democratic constitutionalism in a distinctive way. For the populist leader, law, including higher constitutional law, and the rule of law, is always subordinated to the people’s will incarnated in the executive: thus neither version of legality may limit that power. This means that populist regimes tend not only to destroy the autonomy of apex courts (through packing or other means as indicated earlier) but also to elide the distinction between constituent and constituted power.194 As we argued earlier, the incentive to create new constitutions and to refound the polity is present in all populist governments. Constant recourse to the constituent power, whether in the form of amendments or constitutional replacement and repeated acts of packing and reducing the jurisdiction of apex courts capable of statutory or even amendment review all indicate an abiding interest creating and strengthening the authoritarian components of the hybrid regime we are calling populist competitive authoritarianism. It is even more strongly confirmed by the majoritarian non-​consensual procedures of constitution-​making and the continuation of the amending process even in the new populist constitutions. Indeed the quasi-​permanence of the constituent power allegedly embodied in the populist executive indicates the tendency toward further regime change in the direction of outright authoritarianism and dictatorship. But we should not jump the gun here: the populist subtype of hybrid regime also has a strong interest in retaining democratic legitimacy even if the logical outcome of both left and right populisms would be toward a new regime of authoritarian dictatorship. It is also possible that opposition forces in civil and political society and those remaining in the key institutions such as courts, legislatures, and the administration, might be able to defeat the populist hybrid regime and push it in a democratic direction. We will look at that possibility in the last chapter.

The Populist Dictatorship We conclude this chapter with a brief reflection on the second threshold issue, namely the shift from a hybrid populist regime to a full version of authoritarian dictatorship, albeit perhaps one that is less violent than harsher versions existing in other contexts. What would be the signposts of such a transition? Recall that according to Linz’s criteria for classifying full authoritarian regimes there is a spectrum between monism and pluralism, mobilization and civil

Populist Governments and Their Logic  151 privatism, and from ideology to mentality. Thus a full authoritarian, populist-​ created regime could remain somewhat pluralist and mobilizational or veer more toward civil privatism and pragmatism, downplaying ideology. A variety of subtypes of populist-​created authoritarianism are possible. But a sure sign of the shift over to a full authoritarian regime would be the fact that despite all appeals to popular sovereignty, an incumbent party and leader can no longer lose elections. This means that the regime has become effectively a single party state. An equally important sign would be the impossibility of serious challenge to the rules and practices, formal and informal, put in place by the populist regime to consolidate its control, except by the regime itself. The fact that a populist subtype of an authoritarian regime has a constitution and a table of rights is not the determining factor. Rather, the key would be the relationship of its table of rights to their enforcement and the existence of independent institutions of supervision and complaint—​horizontal as well as vertical, formal as well as informal/​counter-​democratic. When enforcement of rights is fully compromised, whether constitutionally or only in practice, when independent supervisory organs (separation of powers) are gone, when communication among political contenders is no longer possible, then of course elections are no longer even partially free or fair. Such a system, given what is minimal in populist ideology would still have elections, but these would now morph fully over into what populism always viewed to be their function namely that of generating identification and involving purely symbolic representation—​not a form entailing accountability or responsiveness to the demands and aspirations of electorates. In such a system party pluralism could still exist but other parties would be denied the chance to compete meaningfully or win. Civil society would also exist under a full authoritarian populist regime but primarily in the form of top-​down creations and dependent entities (gleichschaltung). There can be publics as long as the main media of communication are completely under government control. As indicated earlier courts and apex courts can continue to exist but they would be disempowered regarding their function in policing the separation of powers and ensuring the constitutional reflexive regulation of law making. One final and crucial additional sign that a populist regime has crossed the threshold to full authoritarianism and dictatorship would be the emergence of a dual state such that violations of the rule of law and the politicization of ordinary legality is institutionalized and the prerogative power of the executive is supreme and sovereign, i.e., above any legal jurisdiction, even if some legal rules regarding some domains (the normative state) remain in place to organize, facilitate, and regulate (crony) capitalism or the supposed socialist economy in a left populist regime.

152  Populism and Civil Society To summarize, populism has three shapes: as a movement, as a party, as participating government; and two key thresholds: populism as the government morphing from a democratic to a hybrid regime subtype, and then as an authoritarian regime. In this chapter we discussed the thresholds regarding populism’s relationship to democracy once in government and once as the government. Let us now turn in the next chapter to the relationship between populism and constitutionalism.

4

Populism and Constitutionalism Introduction The undeniably difficult relationship of populism to constitutionalism can be interpreted both on the definitional and causal levels. Key dimensions of our definition, namely the insistence on internal friend and enemy conflict instead of relations of opposition, the idea of a unitary people symbolically represented by a part, the claim of embodiment of the genuine people in a charismatic or personalistic leader, all definitely come into conflict with the principles and institutions of liberal constitutionalism. If the opposition is understood as the enemy, why should it be accorded protection and the right to participate and even win elections? If the people are fused into one, why should pluralism and minority rights be respected? If the people’s will is embodied in a leader or a group, why should their power be limited? But is there a case for an inevitable conflict of populism with constitutionalism as such? The main dimensions of contemporary populism help explain and predict what we have experienced in many cases, namely attacks on and even attempts to suppress liberal constitutionalism. But if the conflict were with constitutionalism as such, we would have to predict that populist governments will not succeed, or perhaps even try, to establish or preserve any other kind. The same tension with constitutionalism, actual or potential, follows from most other important definitions of populism, as Cas Mudde has demonstrated with respect to his own.1 Following our critique of Laclau, we have also included a notion of the political, understood in terms of the interest in foundation or re-​ foundation of regimes and reliance on the constituent power. The differentiation between constituent and constituted power(s) is an important component of all modern constitutionalism, now including the most liberal versions. But if the premise of the superior status of the constituent power as the political is taken most radically, to the exclusion of any real interest in ordinary politics, the difference between extraordinary and normal politics, constituent, and constituted power would tend to disappear altogether, and with it the interest in written, legal, enforceable constitutions. While such a tendency can be documented for some populisms in power, the reality of populist politics (vs.: the political) is more complex and plural than what follows from definitions. Many populists in power have spent enormous amounts of time and energy writing, replacing, and

154  Populism and Civil Society amending constitutions and not only battling and packing but also relying on, establishing, and using constitutional courts. On the level of causality, we have argued that the long-​term foundation of populism lies in the fundamental tension within modern constitutional democracy, between its two poles: popular sovereignty and constitutionalism.2 We have referred to various liberal and democratic attempts to productively reduce this tension, among them the trend toward universal inclusion in the status of citizens, the role of representation and its historical expansion, the establishment of an institutional space for the constituent power, incorporated in constitutions as democratic amendment rules, the expansion of rights even including the social dimension, and the introduction of democracy into local as well as functional realms. In spite of these attempts, the tension continues, and will, logically at least, because of the difference of the two principles, most likely as long as this form of government exists. Yet populism is different than classical authoritarian forms of the 20th century in trying to resolve the tension, rather than simply abolishing the regime that is its underlying cause.3 Thus, populist politics as movement and, to an extent, even when in government could be interpreted (with a significant degree of charity) as attempts to rebalance democratic politics in favor of popular sovereignty.4 If we admit this endeavor, we have one key to the great, documentable interest of populisms in the constitution, expressed when in power almost always by attacks on the institutions and safeguards of liberal constitutionalism and sometimes, when politically possible, in the enactment of new constitutions. Paradoxically, the result of such efforts is not only authoritarian deformation or hybridization of inherited democracy, as already argued, but also the renewal of the very tension, as we demonstrate in this chapter. Unexpectedly, as we will show, populists cannot seem to avoid sharp conflicts even with the constitutions that they themselves have made and enacted. These conflicts almost always ensued when originally populist constitution makers had to work with allies, and/​or were under inescapable international pressures. But, perhaps surprisingly they have also regularly occurred when populists fully dominated the process of constitution making. The tension between populism and the constitution would imaginably disappear only if and when hybridity was replaced by new authoritarian regimes, a very real tendency that has been only rarely realized. Most of the growing literature on this subject is aware of the authoritarian consequences of populist constitutional politics, but critics like J.W. Müller and G. Halmai5 have some difficulty in explaining the interest in the constitution of very strong advocates of embodied popular sovereignty that goes beyond merely attacking the institutions of liberal constitutionalism. The important articles of David Landau and Rosalind Dixon on “abusive constitutionalism”6 interpret the same interest in terms of legitimation and instrumentalization, admittedly

Populism and Constitutionalism  155 important criteria, but still too narrow because it prejudges the question whether populists authentically aim at a different constitutionalism. On the other side, those with some sympathy for populism, like Ernesto Laclau and Joel Colon-​ Rios, do document the reasons for this interest, namely through their own focus on the foundational or constituent power as the very meaning of the constitution.7 While they claim or imply an interest in a democratic or political or “weak” constitutionalism, they, deliberately or not, occlude the possible authoritarian consequences that have followed from attempts to establish it in most Latin American cases. Beyond the harshest critics, and the strongest defenders, there is a serious intellectual debate as to whether there is such a thing as “populist constitutionalism,” replacing the liberal version. Finally, there is now an argument (also by David Landau8), according to which the results of the constitutional politics of personalistic populists tend to be authoritarian in the short term but the constitutions that they make can formally improve democracy and even constitutionalism, and may even do so materially in the long run once the charismatic leader disappears from the scene. This last interpretation leaves out, though, the roles of external legitimation needs and internal allies in populist coalitions producing this favorable constellation and the likelihood that if these pressures weaken or disappear, it will be the authoritarian elements (admittedly noted) that will be hegemonic. For the moment at least both outcomes seem possible. But depiction of populism as representing foundational projects, or “the political,” is of course not the same as empirical populist politics. Thus many practical political considerations are involved in even initiating “foundational” or “re-​foundational” projects. Generally, populists are in a position to amend or replace an inherited constitution only when in government,9 though there is the possibility that a populist movement or party of opposition will influence constitutional politics dominated by others, if only to co-​opt, channel or preempt the populist appeal.10 In fact, however, only a few populist parties and leaders out of power, as in France, have generated constitutional projects aiming at the re-​foundation of regime and state.11 When in power, the situation is different. As Landau and Dixon show, the “abusive constitutionalism” of populists can focus on projects of replacement and amendment as well as apex court intimidation or capture. We add informal constitution alteration by ordinary law or decree to these techniques, that is implied and absorbed under the politics of court capture by Landau and Dixon. For us in fact all the techniques are logically and even empirically connected, for good technical reasons, and can, and sometimes must, serve as forms of enablement for one another. The populist politics of the constitution has been practiced in a wide array of countries. There have been early examples of populist constitution replacement in Brazil (1937) and Argentina (1949), of a process involving first popular than

156  Populism and Civil Society populist constitution making in Ecuador (1945, 1946), a neo-​populist constitution made in Peru (1992), popular but only legally (i.e., according to decisions of the Supreme Court) populist constitution making in Colombia (1991),12 as well as successful contemporary left populist constitutions drafted and enacted in Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008), and Bolivia (2009). In our decade, there were also significant national populist efforts in Hungary, Turkey, and Poland. In Hungary, the project combined amending the previous constitution, the capture of the Constitutional Court, and finally constitutional replacement. In Turkey, the effort took the form only of amendment packages and court capture, the one aiming to achieve the other, among other important changes. Finally, in Poland court capture was the only project but served as the key to radical informal revision. Such a focus on the court is not entirely unique of course.13 In the United States, where populist movements have often defined themselves in terms of defending or returning to the traditional, commonly sacralized constitution, in their current electoral politics they reveal the wish to change it (or “return” to it) through judicial appointments by the executive. Such a device, not contemplated by the constitution of the founders, contradicts the claim of “originalism” used to justify it. All of these efforts can be depicted as having contested the existing balance between sovereign power and constitutional law, though as the Colombian example shows such a contest may be popular and democratic without being identical to populism in our definition.

Contesting the Balance between Popular Sovereignty and Constitutionalism Version 1. Popular Constitutionalism and Populism in Opposition In some interpretations, populism can rely on liberal constitutionalism as a host ideology.14 Thus on what we depicted as the first and most fundamental level of causality, populism may seem conservative in comparison to revolutionary movements.15 In that case, the attacks of populism as a movement would only be on specific versions of constitutional democracy, as exemplified earlier all by electoral and party systems seen as exclusionary, oligarchic, or “partocratic.”16 Other institutions, both electoral and forms of rights protection, could then be used and relied on at least for a time. If this were right, many populist led or dominated governments could be accused of the same “bait and switch” tactics that they have directed as earlier oppositional movements and parties against left-​ wing competitors, mainly social democrats in Europe and economic populists in Latin America.17 While undoubtedly such criticism would be politically fair

Populism and Constitutionalism  157 in some cases, on a theoretical level at least populists can present themselves as having always been critics of the fundamental democracy deficit of all (not just current) constitutional arrangements based on representative democracy, whether on the national or, especially, the European level.18 Certainly, the main populist theorists, such as Laclau and Mouffe, have insisted on defining themselves and the movements they support in terms of “the political,” understood as “foundational,” and their project in terms of the foundation of a new hegemonic order. Whether one interprets the latter with Mouffe as one within “liberal democracy,” or as an entirely new order, as Laclau implies, it seems to be a clear consequence that the liberal democratic constitution in place must be at the very least revised, and possibly entirely replaced.19 But why? What is wrong with the constitutions of liberal democracies? If we wish to find serious answers to these questions, paradoxically we must look to authors who are themselves not political populists.20 We have in mind not only American and British advocates of the so-​called popular or political constitutionalism,21 but especially Y. Mény and Y. Surel, authors of a major and mostly sympathetic but not uncritical work on populism.22 We discuss in depth the distinction between popular and populist in ­chapter 5. Here we wish to note that, in our view rightly, the two French writers explicitly link the contradictions of constitutional democracy to the populist challenge. According to them, populism contests and wishes to change the existing balance between constitutionalism and popular sovereignty (for them: “populism”!) within contemporary liberal democracies. Most charitably, this argument could be interpreted as the desire to resume the historical trend of democratization, which according to Mény and Surel has been dramatically disrupted by trends after the Second World War. Accordingly, popular or anti-​legal constitutionalism may even be a way of blocking the road to populist authoritarianism.23 At worst, however, treating populism and popular sovereignty as synonyms, these authors imply that democratization must mean the success of populists and their projects. Moreover, their focus on judicialization as a threat to democracy24 entails the danger of attacking and potentially removing the very guarantees of democratic life, including the rights presupposed by participation. To be fair, the argument is more complex than a mere critique of the “new constitutionalism” dominated by courts.25 Mény and Surel, though recalling the 19th century concept of gouvernement des juges, do consider the charge of juristocracy to be an oversimplification. The weakening of the popular-​populist dimension, expressing the spirit of the French revolution, is according to them due to a combination of factors: the shock of authoritarian regression in the 1930s, U.S. post–​World War II imposition, the power of the German example, and most importantly, taking a cue from the literature on post-​democracy,26 neo-​liberalism intensified by economic globalization. Nevertheless, according to

158  Populism and Civil Society them, to be able to understand the populist attack on the constitution, it is essential in this context to consider the problem of constitutional review of the acts of legislatures.27 This happened in Europe, according to Mény and Surel, in at least in two stages, first under US influence and then during the transitions of the 1970s and 1990s, when the Bundesverfassungsgericht became everyone’s model. They consider such review not merely a fundamental limitation of representatives but a limitation of “the people” itself, whatever that means.28 While we are not likely to encounter clarification of the argument among populists in opposition, relying on their rights and their enforcement, we can try to find it among the authors on popular and political constitutionalism. According to them, the idea that one branch among three, the unelected one, alone supervises the constitutionality of the acts of the others, that its voice on this subject is the ultimate one, should be unacceptable even to constitutional democrats.29 If it is important to block usurpation by two branches, then the possible usurpations by the judicial branch should be controlled as well.30 Justification based on the ultimately democratic origins of the system works only in some (probably few!) cases, and as Jefferson already argued, makes new generations hostages to the decisions of an earlier one.31 Nor does the possibility of revision help where amendment rules presuppose very high, repeated majorities, and even unanimity in the case of the EU, and given the infrequency of informal constitutional change of the demanding type stressed by Ackerman.32 Popular and political constitutionalists respond to this state of affairs with either empirical or normative arguments, or a combination. They can maintain, empirically, that constitutionalism has, especially in the United States, always (or till recently!) involved inputs by both the political branches and/​or the people either as collective actors or as participants in the public sphere. Thus constitutions have been matters political as well as legal, or even more political than legal.33 Or normatively, popular constitutionalists can demand that such inputs either be established in the first place or be more securely institutionalized or even more democratized through devices such as referenda and parliamentary override, short of formal amendment. As plausible as it may sound to link such criticisms and recommendations to populist policies and attitudes when “in” or “the” government, this would involve linkages that populists when in opposition still do not seem to make. Indeed, the link implies political conclusions that hopefully most popular or political constitutionalists would reject. Admittedly, there are rare examples, like nationalist offshoots of Solidarity in Poland and the Hungarian ultra-​right around István Csurka and his MIÉP in the 1990s, that seem to make very strong arguments against constitutional courts. But as the topic of these attacks in Hungary at least had to do with the specific decisions of courts inhibiting retroactive justice and the restoration of “original” property relations,34 their

Populism and Constitutionalism  159 emphasis was ultimately elsewhere. As in the case of the Polish ex-​Solidarity new right, the new constitutional order was rejected primarily because of its origins in the round-​table bargains between the “reds” and the “pinks” (ex-​Communists and liberals) as it was often put.35 More generally, then, one common populist attack on the constitution has to do with its supposedly or actually undemocratic origins, whether in processes of round table negotiation among elites as in Poland, Hungary, and even in South Africa, under parliaments claimed to be unrepresentative, as later in Poland, original Western domination as in the case of the failed replacement of the Grundgesetz in the 1990s, military imposition as in Turkey and Chile, and even the US pressure and undue German influence in Europe mentioned by Mény and Surel. In these various versions, populists piggyback on legitimate democratic critique of imposition, mere bargaining among elites, or of the unfinished nature of the constituent process.36 In the case of Viktor Orbán, who as a key participant cannot easily attack the Hungarian Round Table of 1989, it is the third of these criticisms concerning lack of completion that was to justify (see explanation attached to draft of 201137) the making of the new constitution, the Basic Law, and finishing the process that began with the overthrow of Communism in 1989. It is interesting, however, that the project to do this was unmentioned in the FIDESZ electoral campaign of 2010. But radical versions of the same argument emerged in Poland among Solidarity offshoots like the now-​governing Law and Justice (PiS), and breakaway factions of Hungarian national conservative parties. In spite of occasional calls for a new republic (the fourth in Poland, the third in Austria) most of the populist critics of constitutional origins do not provide serious and precise constitutional programs, at least until in power. It is of interest that the best and possibly only38 example of a populist party out of power (rather than mere movements) that made a detailed constitutional proposal was relatively positive concerning the origins of the current constitution, as against claimed later deformations. We have in mind the FN’s Marine Le Pen publishing a twelve-​page constitutional program during the presidential campaign of 2017.39 It is noteworthy, that the FN wanted the program adopted by a referendum, following de Gaulle’s own extra-​constitutional amendment procedure in 1962, rather than the generally used Article 89, the amendment rule. According to Fournier the stated aim was to “give “greatness” back to the 1958 [Gaullist] constitution. The main contents of the FN proposal tell us a great deal about the constitutional aims not only of this party but of all related European national populist organizations. They include: (1) the defense of national identity understood as unity rather than plurality (contradicting the pluralist equality provision of the present Article 1). (2) The re-​establishment of the superiority of French over European law (i.e., deletion of Title XV of the Constitution). (3) The lengthening

160  Populism and Civil Society of the presidential term from five to seven years, along with the reducing by half the number of members of the Assemblée Nationale (by somewhat less for the Sénat). (4) The introduction of PR but with an automatic 30% of the seats for the first placed party in legislative elections. (5) The extension of the scope of referendum for all areas of the law, making it in the future the only path of constitutional amendment, with the threshold of initiation reduced from 4.5 million to about 500,000. (6) A partial re-​centralization of the territory. Fournier is on solid ground arguing that these measures, aside from the nationalist and anti-​European rhetoric, aimed above all to strengthen the role of the plebiscitary presidency against the legislature, as inherited from Gaullism but said to be compromised by subsequent development. Note however that the program does not at all take up the problem of constitutional review, emphasized by the popular and political constitutionalists. It is another matter of course had Marine le Pen had won the presidency and encountered the possible resistance of the Conseil constitutionnel against plebiscitary revision, whether she would have tried to overcome that resistance using de Gaulle’s plebiscitary techniques. The FN’s draft resembled aspects of previous efforts of populists in government, whether the nationalism of Orbán, or the executive strengthening projects that failed in the case of Berlusconi and succeeded for Erdogan. But both its uniqueness among populist movements and parties in opposition and its rapid withdrawal seem to indicate that constitutional opportunism, or relying on the existing constitution as a host, was electorally the better policy. The fact that le Pen and her team tried to appeal to the prestige of de Gaulle’s version of the constitution and his method of enactment and thus propose change by referendum proves the same point. As Paul Blokker documents, even in government, the use of free and fair referenda to pass executive strengthening proposals could be a lost cause for both the populist Berlusconi and the populism pre-​empting Renzi, in spite of de Gaulle’s earlier success.40

Version 2: Movements and Governments in Populist Constitutional Replacement In Europe at least populist movements and parties in opposition seemed to have had a marginal role with respect to constitutional change. The FN proposal’s significance is in its exceptional and temporary status. Recent Latin American left populist cases seem to tell a different story, because of the continuity among a plurality of oppositional challenges to “establishments” and “oligarchies,” the election of populist governments, and successful efforts by the latter to enact new constitutions. With a dress rehearsal in Ecuador, in 1945–​ 1946, a plebiscitary bypass inaugurated in Colombia in 1991 by non-​populists,

Populism and Constitutionalism  161 continuing—​arguably—​in Venezuela, and culminating in Bolivia and Ecuador, movements have challenged existing constitutions as oligarchic, or ethnically exclusionary, or both, and their efforts significantly contributed to the making of new constitutions. The strength of populist discourse and leadership was quite variable in these movements, and it is only backward projection from the electoral and political results that would allow the identification of each of them simply as “populist.” Nevertheless, with the exception of Colombia, popular mobilization and populist leaders were to merge, with very significant results for both the constituent process and the constitutional result. With this said, in the several relevant Latin American cases the relationship between the two types, a popular movement-​based process and populist governmental one, could be very different. The results too varied significantly depending on the respective weight in the effort of the original movements, the new presidents, and the procedural rules enacted by the latter. The dress rehearsal for the important but contested role of movements in constitution making was in Ecuador, 1944–​1946.41 The process started as a military-​civil insurrection in Guayaquil, protesting electoral fraud committed by the “liberal” oligarchy. The defeated candidacy of J. M. Velasco had behind it a broad-​based coalition (ADE) of most of the democratic and left parties, as well as many significant organizations of civil society. After the movement succeeded in forcing the congressional election of Velasco as president, he commenced on a variety of projects, often in conflict with his party and mass supporters. One project that seemed to unify them was converting the newly and freely elected congress dominated by the ADE (with two-​thirds of the seats) into a constituent assembly, to produce a new constitution for Ecuador. As Carlos De La Torre shows however, having assumed the persona of a classical populist leader interested in a plebiscitary, presidentialist form of democracy, Velasco entered into serious conflicts with many of the forces within the constituent assembly and even some components of the heterogeneous ADE. Nevertheless, in spite of his purging socialist and communist ministers, the assembly went on to produce a constitution in 1945, one that Velasco opposed from the beginning to the end. The constitution was in many respects a liberal one, with important checks on the executive, establishing limits to his veto power, a court of “constitutional guarantees,” permanent congressional watch-​dog committees, and strong powers of congressional deposition of the president. After Velasco very reluctantly signed the document, he launched another constitutional project. But it was only after the repression of strong opposition to his plans by original allies that a second constituent assembly could be elected, in 1946, and a more presidentialist constitution, without the “guarantees” of its predecessor, be enacted. Plagued by economic problems, his “success” in constitutional politics did not save him from renewed protest and a military overthrow in 1947. Versions of this story,

162  Populism and Civil Society involving conflicts between populist leaders and the mobilizations that initially supported them, were to be repeated in several Latin American countries. The example of Colombia in 1991 shows that conflicts between movement and the executive power are not inevitable.42 Here it was even more a popular movement from below that commenced the project of new constitution making. The leadership, organization, and demands of the student movement (Todavia podemos salvar Colombia) that mobilized for the seventh ballot in the elections of 1990, calling for a constituent assembly, were not populist in neither our definition nor most others. Nor were the presidents who responded to their demands, V. Barco and C. Gaviria, who recognized the untenability of the previous formally oligarchic system. Most importantly, the process itself was pluralist, involving pre-​assembly negotiations43 and the enactment of a proportional electoral rule allowing wide participation by parties reflecting a variety of important social constituencies. While the attempt to limit the constituent assembly failed because of the legally sovereigntist decision of the Supreme Court,44 even this dogmatic and theory driven attempt did not diminish the outcome: a liberal, pluralist, socially sensitive document that had some significant features expanding participation. The Venezuelan process that became a genuine case of populist constitution making was very different. Admittedly here too the oligarchic nature of the previous regime, and especially given the many valid criticisms of this state of affairs, provided the ultimate justification for new constitution making.45 But here, unlike in Colombia, there was no popular grassroots movement dedicated to the beginning of a constituent process. While in Venezuela too there were organized forces whose actions led to the result, their aim was first and foremost electoral, not constitutional. Among them an explicitly populist leadership-​oriented constellation, the M200 and its successor, played the major role. To be sure, while one could interpret the views of many, especially the leftist components of the coalition to aim at such result, the intention to make a new constitution was not initially announced, any more than in Hungary ten years later. The project was declared by President Chavez, after his election. It remained his from the beginning to the end. Most importantly, he and his narrow circle produced the electoral rule for the process; first rejected by the Supreme Court as outside the constitution, its adoption was then allowed through a referendum, supposedly the organ of popular sovereignty. The rule itself was exclusionary with respect to parties by forcing them to run on one of two lists, and permissive with respect to the president, whose chuletas (lists) helped to produce an overwhelming majority for his supporters in the constituyente (constituent assembly).46 The result was dramatically disproportional, yielding 92% of 131 seats with 65% of the votes for Chavez and 7% of seats with 35% of votes for various oppositions, for an index of disproportionality, or D, of 26. Paradoxically, unlike in Colombia,

Populism and Constitutionalism  163 here the Supreme Court after first playing an enabling role eventually became an opponent of the populist project, but, disciplined by impeachments and packing, failed in that capacity. The cases of Bolivia and Ecuador fall between the Colombian and Venezuelan extremes. In both, independent, primarily ethnically based movements were heavily involved, and many of them, especially the indigenous mobilization based in civil society, pushed for constitutional reconstruction in the name of a radical pluralistic version of the republic.47 While leaders with populist self-​ understanding were associated with each experiment, their status, political profile, and especially power were different from those of Chavez, from the beginning as in the case of Morales or ultimately in that of Correa. Evo Morales was a grassroots leader of the Cocaleros, an important but not totally dominant, primarily indigenous component of the mobilization. His new party the MAS was an alliance or confederation of a wide variety of organizations, movements, and groups of which the coca growers were only one. The project of making a new constitution was not in the original program of MAS, but was the “long held demand of indigenous and popular organizations,” and Morales seemed to have adopted it in his campaign.48 Nevertheless, as in Colombia and Venezuela initially, the constituent assembly was not meant to be nor did it become the sole sovereign power of Bolivian society. The previously elected Congress stayed in place to exercise its other functions, which came to include a role in the ratification of the Assembly’s product. Even more importantly, the election of the constituent assembly in 2006 was not disproportional and exclusionary as in the Venezuelan case.49 Opposition strength was significant in Bolivia, close to 40%; neither did the MAS, even with its allies, have a constitution making (or: drafting) majority. Morales and the MAS were forced to seriously negotiate with the opposition, especially after the latter resorted to procedural obstruction, hunger strikes, and boycotts. What became the bases of the final text, according to Nancy Postero, was itself negotiated and contained radical democratic and “pluri-​national” elements demanded by the mostly indigenous movements. But it also had a liberal frame that the opposition demanded and MAS conceded.50 Understandably, the popular supporters of no side were satisfied with what was inevitably a second-​best solution for each. After anti-​MAS street protests and the removal of the Assembly from one city to city, another opposition boycott followed, leading to a rump Assembly. The final vote on the text was in fact purely majoritarian, violating the rules of the Assembly as agreed upon, and thus arguably illegitimate and even illegal. Nevertheless, the text was ratified by Congress51 in 2008 (after further EU refereed negotiations and with some modifications) and then by a referendum agreed upon by both sides, initiated by grassroots supporters of Morales.52 The legal problems of the process were thus not resolved by an unelected court as in Colombia or unilaterally by

164  Populism and Civil Society the assembly itself as in Venezuela, but by the process of historically established legislation and approval. Ecuador’s case was different yet again. Here in 2006 Rafael Correa ran for the presidency, as “a quintessential outsider” and won after losing the first round.53 Having recently organized a not yet competitive party (Movimiento Alianza Pais) he did not nominate candidates for Congress at all. Thus his opponents and others dominated the elections for what became a fragmented legislative body. It was from the vantage point of a strong presidency that Correa launched his constitutional project, which he had already vaguely promised during the presidential election. In doing so, he adopted in effect long-​standing demands of social, especially indigenous movements. Since the existing constitution no more provided for a constituent assembly than in Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia, the president successfully moved to establish such a body by referendum, originally for the single purpose of constitution making. With the help of an intense media campaign, Correa’s party, the MPAIS, now won the elections for the constituent assembly, controlling over two-​thirds of the seats.54 Nevertheless, the demands of social movements outside, though weakened in the new personalistic atmosphere and by attacks on them by Correa, were incorporated by the Constituent Assembly in the final result, which was confirmed in another referendum. That outcome resembled the one in Bolivia, at least for the time being. But unlike in Bolivia, though as in Venezuela, Correa had the TSE (supreme electoral tribunal) purge Congress, and move toward assuming sovereign powers for the Constituent Assembly under presidential leadership. This was expressed or “legalized” by using the Congress, recomposed with alternates, to dismiss the Constitutional Tribunal, and replace it with a new body of that name. It was this new apex court that sustained the purge of the old. The Constituent Assembly finished the job of making itself sovereign by suspending Congress entirely for the duration.55 It is clear that the legal and institutional differences with Venezuela as well as Colombia led to difficult conflicts both in Bolivia and Ecuador. The fundamental cause of these was the combination of mobilized society with the formation of a strong populist political movement party with a personalistic leader who was not easily inclined to compromise. In Bolivia, the outcome was a series of boycotts by the opposition and eventually its exclusion from the Constituent Assembly in the final vote. Admittedly, this led to compromises between the sides in Congress, that in Bolivia uniquely remained in place. In Ecuador however the conflict was between Congress as a whole and the president, the latter relying on two bodies he dominated, the TSE and Constituent Assembly. Here the result was based more on unilateral imposition. Even with the fundamental differences, there is a case to be made, which R. Madrid56 makes only for Bolivia, that in all four countries three ideological

Populism and Constitutionalism  165 forces were able to make important but significantly different inputs into the constitution: plebiscitary by the leadership of the parties around the president, participatory by the grassroots movements, and liberal by the opposition. Even if subsequently, with the exception of non-​populist Colombia, the dominant element became the plebiscitary one, new conflicts among the forces were almost preprogrammed in the text. Indeed, the constitutions produced in the four countries contained various combinations of plebiscitary, liberal, and participatory elements. This overlap is a puzzle, because of the difference in constituent methods and procedures between the dominant presidential-​plebiscitary role in Venezuela and Ecuador and the processes in Colombia and Bolivia where oppositional parties and independent movements either in the Constituent Assembly or Congress played a greater role. Four factors account for the convergence, most likely. The first is the demonstration effect among countries, which may account for at least the appearance of pluralistic institutional solutions in each. The second factor, the strength of social movements and their various types, reinforced this pluralism but led to versions with different contents: for example the strength of indigenous self-​determination in the Bolivian and Ecuadorian constitutions as against the stress on civil society forms of participation in Colombia and Venezuela. Thirdly, the presence of international—​EU, Carter Center, and especially Organization of American States (OAS)—​observers re-​ enforced the demands for classical liberal rights and free electoral participation already demanded by strong oppositions in Bolivia and Ecuador and a weak one in Venezuela. Finally, the crisis of neo-​liberal austerity politics motivated all the constitution makers, more and more as the relevant decade and a half progressed, to include strong social and economic rights in the documents. Here the role of traditional left parties, present in the assemblies or in the populist coalitions, was an important factor. Relying on socialism, ethnic-​pluralism, or even economic populism as host ideologies thus had significant consequences for the constitutions to be made.

Version 3: Constitution Replacement Dominated by Executives: Peru and Hungary The constitutional processes and outcomes of right-​wing neo-​populism in Peru in 1992–​1993, and national populism in Hungary in 2010–​2011 were significantly different from the Latin American left populist versions. It is not only (the very different) ideologies that were responsible for this. A more important factor was greater executive control over the very different constituent patterns in both countries, leading to the exclusion of any role for social movements or even parties outside the government.

166  Populism and Civil Society The earlier one took place in Peru.57 Here an outsider politician, Alberto Fujimori won a dramatic victory in the presidential elections of 1990, even as his makeshift party, Cambio 90, received only about 16% (of both votes and seats) for the lower chamber of Congress. It should be noted that his campaign was clearly and successfully a populist one, aiming at the poor, the “precariat” of the informal economy, evangelical Christians, and those who (rightly) felt themselves excluded from politics on ethnic grounds: mestizos, the indigenous, and Afro-​Peruvians.58 After intractable conflicts with both Congress and the courts, that arguably took place because of his bait and switch tactics supporting an externally supported austerity program,59 Fujimori carried out a militarily backed extra-​constitutional coup, or autogolpe, dissolving both Congress and the high courts (Supreme Court and Tribunal of Constitutional Guarantees). From the beginning the act was legitimated by plebiscitary means, by frequent appeal to support in public opinion surveys that documented, even before the coup, not only support for the president but widespread hostility to Congress and the judiciary. Following international, US, and especially OAS pressure insisting on return to constitutional rule,60 the president chose to use the instrument of an elected constituent assembly (Democratic Constituent Congress) whose purpose was not only the recovery of legitimacy but securing constitutional changes empowering the executive and weakening the other branches. Now, and this was one of the points of the exercise, his “party,” Cambio 90, achieved over 50% of the seats (with 49% of the votes). This result however was facilitated by the (probably gravely mistaken) electoral boycotts by three major parties that had received at least 40% of the previous congressional vote in 1992.61 Thus Cambio and Fujimori were able to engage in unilateral, purely majoritarian constitution making, while the president ruled in terms of emergency and decree powers. On his own he reconstituted the two high courts, with purely presidential candidates. Unsurprisingly to anyone, the constitutional result was in all respects executive strengthening: changing the presidency’s one-​term limit to two, providing for more extensive and less limited decree and emergency powers than the constitution of 1979, enacting greater powers of congressional dissolution, and abolishing the upper chamber altogether. Regional governments too were eliminated. While unlike in Colombia and Venezuela no prior authority for a constituent assembly was sought by referendum, the Fujimori constitution was subsequently so ratified with the rather thin support of 52%, a result that has been widely considered fraudulent. The moves followed from and were consistent with the populist identity Fujimori has cultivated. Interestingly however, despite his earlier denunciations of “partocracy,” no new direct democratic elements were included, unlike in the left populist cases of Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Indeed, his choice of host ideology, neo-​liberalism after his bait and switch, had important consequences

Populism and Constitutionalism  167 for the substance of his constitution. According to Nicolas Lynch, all mention of the welfare state in the 1979 Constitution was eliminated, the chapter on social security was erased, social rights were no longer among the fundamental rights, while the property chapter declared an absolute right of private property and eliminated (cooperative, social) or weakened (state ownership) other forms of property.62 Even more characteristically, the Fujimori constitution was strong on strengthening the presidency: expanding powers to dissolve Congress and declare states of emergency, putting military appointments in the hands of the president alone, and most importantly for Fujimori, presidential re-​election was introduced, to be applied retroactively.63 Under these new arrangements, Fujimori was re-​elected twice, and it was only in his third term, after repeated scandals and misuse of powers, that he was impeached and forced into exile. The one European case of right-​wing populist constitutional replacement, that of Hungary, was in many respects completely different. Here, to begin with, there was mono-​cameral parliamentary rather than presidential government, without any term limits. The potentially authoritarian powers64 of the governing party and especially its leader controlling the executive branch were greatly strengthened by a highly disproportional electoral rule and a relatively easy (two-​thirds of) single chamber amendment rule as long as a majority or even near majority in elections could be attained. It was attained by FIDESZ in 2010, receiving over two-​thirds of the seats with just over 50% of the actual votes. Unlike in Peru, here there was no conflict, actual or even potential, between the executive and parliament, because of both the nature of parliamentary government and the domination of the majority party by its leader. But in Hungary too, even more so than in Peru, there was an apex judicial instance, the Constitutional Court, that has historically resisted and invalidated decisions of the other branches and could (as well as did) again. Whether or not an extra-​constitutional process (of either the Venezuelan type relying on a referendum or the Peruvian autogolpe) would have been possible in Hungary, there was no need for it with FIDESZ possessing the famous parliamentary two-​thirds. Nevertheless, the impediments potentially in the way of a purely legal process had to be removed. The method of repeated constitutional amendments provided the means.65 As many have argued, if there was a legal coup hidden within the national populist turn in Hungary it involved using the method of constitutional amendments prior to constitutional replacement, as well as an amendment formally enacted in the same way. The most important of the 10–​12 amendments66 of the 1989–​1990 Constitution had to do with removing possible (even if not probable or undisputed) impediments in the face of the effort of replacement. These focused, barely noticeably,67 on the amendment rule, and very openly and repeatedly on the Constitutional Court: its jurisdiction, mode of appointment, and membership. As to the amendment rule, this involved removing a previous

168  Populism and Civil Society amendment requiring four-​fifths of parliament to agree to any rules of new constitution making. Since this move was achieved by a two-​thirds vote, arguably it is here on July 10, 2010, that an extra-​constitutional break, a legal coup, occurred.68 That move, almost at the beginning of a stream of amendments, already implied a (potential or only imaginable?) limitation of the Constitutional Court, by removing the textual bases from the 1989–​1990 Constitution that could have the bases of the invalidation of the procedure for replacement FIDESZ had in mind. But other attacks on the Court’s structure and role were more obvious and in the longer run more significant.69 Beginning even before the revision of the replacement rule (July 5, 2010), these included changing the appointment structure of judges and the selection of the Court’s president from a parliamentary consensual nomination to one relying on the plenum’s two-​thirds procedure alone, the restriction of jurisdiction in the case of financially relevant legislation in October 2010, after an adverse decision by the Court, and eventually, in early 2011, the expansion of the size of the Court from 11 to 15. The latter was clearly a Court packing scheme, adding four new judges to the three appointments soon due because of retirements. That last move with new judges taking office in September 2011 predated the coming into effect of the new Basic Law (Alaptörvény) in 2012, in which the amendments regarding the Court were now included. But, in addition, the new Constitution also abolished the ability of any citizen to initiate abstract consideration of constitutionality (actio popularis) and replaced it with the possibility of “constitutional complaint” when an individual’s rights are directly affected, thus shifting the focus from the possible control of legislation to the examination and possible invalidation of court decisions.70 On a very formal level, the constitutional amendments and the new Basic Law shifted Hungary from a version of consensus democracy toward one based on a majoritarian version of parliamentary sovereignty.71 To be sure, this did not mean the formal elimination of institutions of guarantees, such as the constitutional and ordinary courts, commissions supervising elections, the media, and the office of defending individual rights. But through changing appointment structures, jurisdiction, and procedures all of these institutions were captured and/​or very much reduced in power. Thus it is unfortunately accurate to speak of the dramatic elimination of checks and balances, a prediction that has become even more accurate with the passing of six years than when it was originally was made.72 It is moreover not the power of the legislature that was thus enhanced. Given the fused prime minister dominated model of a single chamber parliamentary government, and given the hierarchical and leadership organization of the ruling party FIDESZ, it was the executive and its head that gained from the dramatic weakening of the separation of powers and the weakening of checks.73 To sum up the comparison of Peru and Hungary, between the two executive dominated constitutional projects, populism of the right was involved in

Populism and Constitutionalism  169 both countries if under very different institutional and political frameworks. The common result of constitutional changes were, however, clearly executive strengthening, weakening other independent branches of power. With the taming of constitutional courts in both, the difference between normal and constitutional politics was greatly reduced, with the attending serious damage to constitutionalism. Thus the similarity and the contrast between the two cases allows us to note the common function of two formally very different institutional paths, extra-​legal rupture in the one case and a legal or legalistic continuity in the other. Indeed, some interpreters regard the legal path from one constitutional identity to another in Hungary as a hidden coup, and not without reason.74 Thus, if in 1989 some could speak of a revolution taking a legal form (e.g., L. Sólyom’s jogállami forradalom = rechstaatliche Revolution), in 2010 the same could be said about a coup d’état. Taking the comparison further, all five cases of populist constitution replacement in Latin America and Europe have in common the plebiscitary element of executive strengthening at the expense of the other powers of the state, the legislature and the judiciary. The left and right populist cases, depending on different host ideologies, also have different constitutional outcomes. The left cases all involved, on paper at least, the introduction of different elements of popular participation and social protection. Since the cases on the right did not, initially at least, the executive strengthening element was even more dominant. Nevertheless, with populist governments in power, the difference between left and right versions could be and was reduced if not entirely eliminated. This was possible because of the availability of alternative instruments of formal and informal constitutional change that could be used in place of constitutional replacement or, paradoxically, even after such a replacement. It is to these methods that we will now turn.

Version 4: Constitutional Politics via Amendment and Court Packing: Turkey and Poland Populist politics of constitutional change need not rely on replacement as their only instrument. Constitutional amendment, informal revision, as well as altering the composition and/​or changing the jurisdiction of constitutional and supreme courts can also be used.75 Often, in many countries, there is a connection between these tools. As we have seen in Hungary, amendment of constitution making procedures and court alteration were needed (at least in the apparent view of the government) before full replacement was attempted, which was only formally itself an amendment. Informal revision usually needs acceptance or confirmation by apex courts. Often, but not always, constitutional amendments

170  Populism and Civil Society are needed to change the composition and jurisdiction of these courts. Under some constitutions statutes are enough for this purpose, but arguably they would amount to informal constitutional change that courts can choose to review.76 All the same the three processes, replacement, amendment, court capture can also take place separately. Only informal revision does not seem to stand alone, if there is a constitutional court, because it needs court passivity or capture. Nevertheless, it is only rarely that one of the three tools of replacement, amendment, and court capture can be used without relying on any of the others. An open constitutional coup leading to replacement as in Peru could proceed without previous amendment. In such a case confirmation by an apex court was also not needed, since that body was dissolved along with Congress. Similarly, but only in part, extra-​constitutional referenda can be used to legitimate calling a constituent assembly, as in the non-​populist case of Colombia, followed by two populist leaderships, in Venezuela as well as Ecuador.77 But, in cases without an open coup, the confirmation of the legality of the process by the apex court was needed and generally attained, whether by previously existing courts, or new, packed bodies. Constitutional amendments can mean alterations of constitutional identity without being called “replacement” or new constitution making. Whatever they are called, some “amendments” can be disguised or proudly declared replacements as in Hungary both in 1989 and 2011.78 But the method of amendments properly so called can also yield incremental change of identity, or stealth authoritarianism as it has been well named.79 Yet in cases where there are unchangeable provisions as in Turkey, or an established “basic structure” or replacement doctrine as in India and now Colombia, there are limits to such amending process. Where however courts consider the procedurally correct use of the amending power as equivalent to the constituent one, as in Hungary, the former is in effect unlimited and can be used to replace as well as merely alter.80 The situation with informal constitutional change is parallel, but today only theoretically. Where there is no apex court with powers of constitutional review, thus no formal distinction between the two tracks of constitutional lawmaking and legislation, mere statute can alter the constitution. Since such a situation is today rare, informal constitutional change whether by statute or decree requires court confirmation.81 In settings where this is the case, and especially where amendment review is established, the composition and jurisdiction of the apex court becomes the key stake of populist constitutional politics. As we have seen in Turkey, the assertion of amendment review by the Constitutional Court is the greatest challenge possible to a populist government, in its own estimation. There, it was the invalidation of the so-​called headscarf amendments in 2007 that led to a successful project of amendment and court-​ packing in 2010, one that enabled the government, still using the method of

Populism and Constitutionalism  171 amendment, to replace the parliamentary form of government by a presidential one in 2017. Under intense political pressure, the Constitutional Court, after initially invalidating politically less consequential amendments dealing with women’s dress, wound up consenting to its own dramatic weakening. In 2010, the Court faced and validated an amendment package that included several popular and desirable components like the reduction of the role of military tribunals in civilian affairs. The main point of the package was however packing the same Court with six new members chosen by the AKP government.82 In the next few years, a new amendment round, changing the country’s constitutional identity from a parliamentary to a hyper-​presidentialist republic, would no longer have to overcome the defense of eternity clauses by the apex court. As the Hungarian and Polish cases show however, change of court composition and jurisdiction can be a response to the invalidation of statute rather than amendment. In Hungary, these measures were also pre-​emptive as in Turkey, opening the door to changing the constitution’s identity. It was however in the Polish case, where the Law and Justice government did not and does not have amending majority, that the struggle over the courts (Constitutional Tribunal [CT], Supreme Court, and regular courts) became the main arena of constitutional crisis. In retrospect, it should be undeniable that this conflict had to do ultimately with attempts of the executive (or the power behind him, L. Kaczynski) to achieve informal constitutional change. As W. Sadurski shows, in Poland the government’s struggle with the CT took place in two stages.83 The first, having to do with the removal of constitutional constraints, involved an extremely complex process of packing and disciplining projects. The effort was greatly facilitated (i.e., legitimated) by the indefensible and illegal “midnight” attempt of the previous government to name five new justices to the CT, rather than three as it was legally allowed. The new PiS government with the help of the allied president (who had no constitutional veto rights) refused to seat any of the five and elected new justices in their place. When the issue was contested, the CT itself made the obviously correct decision to validate the seating of three justices nominated by the old and two by the new parliament. This was however (unconstitutionally) disregarded, and only the five new justices were “confirmed” by President Duda. Perhaps this is the moment when a case can be made for a stealth self-​coup.84 Yet, given the Court decision regarding the case that sought to transform it and the resistance of then Court President Rzeplinski, initially only two of the PiS judges were actually seated. Neither the three previously, legally appointed nor the three illegally appointed new judges could join the CT. As a result, the government did not yet have a majority for the moment on the twelve (vs. the legal fifteen) member CT, and battles between the two branches continued. Six parliamentary statutes followed, each seeking to make the Court unable to act. They involved primarily issues of appointment, terms of office, selection of panels,

172  Populism and Civil Society time lengthening before decisions could be taken, voting procedures (replacing majority by two-​thirds in the decisions of the CT), and finally, after adverse CT decisions on many of these very measures, the famous refusal to publish CT judgments. It is still not completely clear who would have won the first stage of the Polish constitutional crisis, the government with its weapon of legislation or the CT majority with its instrument of invalidation and support from several European institutions. But natural attrition and ends of terms, especially of CT President Rzeplinski, came to the government’s help. It was when a new president of the CT enabled the seating of the last three “new judges” that there was finally a government supporting majority. Now the second stage of the constitutional politics of the PiS could begin, the project of using the apex court for legitimation and enforcement purposes. Astonishingly, but on the political level very logically, as Sadurski argues and documents, the disciplinary measures aiming at the CT, previously proposed or enacted, were now dropped.85 The road was open to use the CT to invalidate previous laws inhibiting the government and, even more importantly, to sustain and thereby legitimate new statutes and executive actions in violation of the Constitution that could not be formally changed. Thus, as the Polish example shows, intimidation aimed to weaken resistance of the apex court and court capture meaning its instrumentalization are not only to be differentiated as Landau and Dixon stress, but can be two stages of what they call “abusive judicial review.” While the changes after 2017, with a new CT majority, did not produce a fully authoritarian state, the capture of the regular courts and the bodies that regulate them, the erosion of open parliamentary process, the weakening of fundamental rights of assembly and speech, and the takeover of public media helped to produce at the very least a diminished constitutional democracy and arguably a hybrid populist authoritarianism, or a strong trend toward consolidating such a form. The most important aspect of this was the dramatic weakening of the separation of powers implied by the capture of the CT, which became in the end an instrument rather than a controller of government. It is an interesting question which method of constitutional politics served the purposes of populist authoritarianism best: replacement, amendment, or court capture. The Polish government seems to continually regret not having the amending power, or the power to make a new constitution of a “Fourth Republic,” but there is also an argument to be made that the regular recourse to informal amendment using a pliant court, that can continue even after replacement, is more corrosive of constitutionalism based on limits to power and to a two-​track structure of lawmaking.

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The Version after: Populist Treatment of New Constitutions Given the critique of liberalism by populist movements and parties, we should not be surprised by efforts at constitution amending and replacement by populism in government. As we will discuss later in more detail, such activity has been sometimes noted as evidence of a populist new constitutionalism, altering, as already said, the balance between popular sovereignty and legalized restraint. The relatively short history of the relationship of populists to their own constitutions could be cited as counter-​evidence. In all, the five cases of full replacement, as well as the Turkish example of two rounds of identity challenging amendments, speak for a thesis denying the possibility of a genuinely populist version of constitutionalism. The FIDESZ government in Hungary, having had eight years under its new Basic Law is in the forefront of the trend. The reason probably is not the length of time but rather the original burden of having to carry out constitutional replacement under the shadow of two sets of European treaties. These made it unavoidable that Orbán and his followers incorporate formal constitutional restraints, like a traditional table of basic rights and the existence of an admittedly diminished Constitutional Court capable of counter-​majoritarian invalidation. The problem FIDESZ had to begin with was then exacerbated by the initial resistance of even the packed Court to statutes and even quasi-​constitutional legislation.86 In any case during the relevant period, FIDESZ amended its own constitution nine times, including transitional measures enacted before the Basic Law even came into effect. This amounts to roughly one amendment per year, or if we include previous revisions of the inherited Constitution, about twenty in ten years. Of the many amendments, about a quarter represented responses to adverse Court decisions. Most corrosive of all perhaps was the neutralization by amendment (the fourth) of all judicial precedents prior to the Basic Law, even where the legal provision relied on by the Constitutional Court was the same in both Constitutions.87 These revisions, which earned the strong critique of the Venice Commission, were enabled ultimately by the (packed) Court’s reluctance to review the substance of constitutional amendments.88 In Latin America only Venezuela comes close the Hungarian pattern. Here, as we said, amendments were not needed to initiate replacement, with the disciplining of the Supreme Court and the changes of its membership playing the same enabling role. In Venezuela it was less international pressure than the role of social movements that helped to pluralize even the political party led by Chavez, leading to the inclusion of fundamental rights, limitations of power, and even participatory democratic provisions in the new 1999 Constitution.89 Once, however, that Constitution was enacted, neither court packing nor repeated amending came to an end. As to the first, after the initial act of Supreme Court reconstitution through removal and packing, two additional efforts (one

174  Populism and Civil Society under Chavez in 2004, the other under Maduro in 2015) were made to further change the composition of this body in favor of the government.90 These measures played a key role in the initial and eventual success of the amending effort. The first of these were, similarly to Hungary, transitional provisions enacted after the ratification of the Constitution in 1999 that involved substantive changes that were to be no longer submitted to a referendum of ratification.91 As in Turkey in 2010 and 2017, a huge package of over 50 amendment items followed in 2007, which was supposed to change the structure of the state in a more plebiscitary direction. Similarly to Turkey in 2010, the executive strengthening features were obscured by generally popular and even normatively defensible parts of a large package of revisions. The difference however was that in Venezuela the package as a whole was defeated in the referendum, similarly to a later defeat concerning presidential re-​election in Bolivia. The narrow defeat however was not going to deter Chavez. After defeat in the referendum, with the compliance of the newly packed Supreme Court, the part most important to him, the abolition of term limits with unlimited re-​eligibility of the president was enacted on a lower track of the multi-​level amendment structure. Though done in spite of a constitutional prohibition on the re-​ introduction of a failed amendment in the same term, it was nevertheless ratified in 2009. According to Brewer-​Carias, as well as Dixon and Landau, other parts of the earlier amendment package to 33 Articles of the Constitution were subsequently re-​passed either as organic statutes or emergency decrees, again with Supreme Court compliance.92 Finally under President Maduro, after a lost election for National Assembly in 2015, a new constituent assembly was invoked and elected in 2017. This move was under the highest amending track of the constitution, but strikingly enough not with the purpose of constitutional revision. Instead, the aim was sidelining and eventually entirely disempowering the legislative body where the Chavistas lost their earlier majority. This effort too required not only the use of the amendment structure but also the compliance of the Court. As it happened, this was easy to accomplish with the re-​packing, “midnight” effort by the lame duck National Assembly in 2015, whose Chavista majority had just lost the legislative elections.93 The outcome was the step-​by-​step abolition of the double differentiation between legislature and constituyente implied by the very amendment rule under which the later assembly was elected. With the establishment of a constituent assembly as a kind of permanent body also with legislative powers, the two-​track structure required under the concept of any “constitutionalism” was suspended if not yet definitively abolished.94 It was a repeat performance, in the words of Marx aptly cited by Landau: “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Populism and Constitutionalism  175 The use of amendments under new constitutions in Colombia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia all involved the issue, key also in Venezuela, namely presidential re-​eligibility. In Colombia, the first effort of the right-​wing populist president Uribe to establish the possibility of a second term by constitutional amendment was sustained by the Supreme Court. The second effort however, to secure the possibility of a third term was not, leading to the articulation of the famous replacement doctrine directed against unconstitutional constitutional amendments.95 Elsewhere, apex courts played the enabling role more consistently. In particular in Nicaragua and Ecuador, Supreme Courts sustained constitutional amendments abolishing term limits.96 Most egregiously, in Bolivia the Plurinational Constitutional Tribunal first allowed the proposal of an amendment mandating a fourth term. After however President Morales narrowly lost the referendum ratifying that outcome, the same Court in 2017 then made the original term limits in the new Constitution of 2009 itself “unconstitutional” by referring, weirdly enough, to international human rights law embodied supposedly in inter-​American treaties.97

Is There a Populist Constitutionalism? The populist struggle with the constitution, as we have argued, takes different forms in different countries. A range of outcomes have emerged. These are: (1) the formal acceptance of inherited constitutions in Turkey and Poland, while intimidating and packing the formal enforcer; (2) the making of a new constitution but its continued weakening by amendments and decisions by captured courts as especially in Hungary but also in Latin America; and finally (3) the obliteration of any differentiation between a constitutional track of government and the ordinary legislative one as recently in Venezuela. This range of realized possibilities clearly raises the question whether there is such a thing a “populist constitutionalism.” Those who take their stands around liberal or pluralist constitutionalism tend to deny that such thing exists. To them populist constitutionalism is an oxymoron.98 Those on the other hand who imply that the possibility is indeed relevant often fail to define the underlying term,99 in other words to fully specify the genus to which populist constitutionalism belongs as a member.100 Thus constitutionalism can simply mean having a constitution with some kind of purpose, or having a discourse or practice related to constitutions,101 or having an ideology that has a place for written constitutions with certain features.102 To consider our question here, we need to do better. We start with the canonical treatment of C. H. McIlwain: “in all its successive phases constitutionalism has one essential quality; it is a legal limitation of government; it is the antithesis of arbitrary rule . . . the government of will instead of law.”103 It is easy to agree

176  Populism and Civil Society with G. Sartori that this is a normatively structured conception around the idea of freedom rather than a merely stipulative or conventional definition, and that empirically, in its modern versions, the notion brings together the competing ideas of the rule of (elected) legislators with the rule of law. Yet his claim that the conception identifies constitutionalism with its historically dominant liberal version is less certain.104 J. Waldron for example, in the path of Hannah Arendt, rightly asks whether limitation should exhaust the concept of constitution, as against the idea of constituting or empowering rather than restraining agents and agency.105 Less radical in his critique of liberal constitutionalism, R. Bellamy distinguishes between limitation and, for him the proper meaning, the prevention of arbitrary government. Insisting on the second as the meaning of constitutionalism as a genus, he differentiates liberal or legal from republican or political constitutionalism.106 The former uses law and courts as the primary means of limiting government, the latter relies on the separation and division of powers as the means of avoiding the arbitrariness of any one institution. Another way of conceptualizing constitutionalism as the prevention of arbitrary government that links liberal and republican conceptions, is to argue that it means that no instance of governmental power can be above or outside the constitution.107 Both Waldron and Bellamy seek to promote democratic constitutionalism, a goal we agree with.108 We note however that without limits on the most powerful or “most dangerous” institutions, neither the empowerment of others nor the separation of powers can be enforced. Thus limits and empowerment fundamentally belong together. Accordingly, in our view modern, constitutionalism does have a liberal dimension, though not necessarily individualistic or economically liberal. We would define it as the rule of law principle of the limitation of all state powers, in the name of securing individual and collective forms of autonomy and participation. We agree: (1) that these principles exist in different historical forms, e.g., liberal, republican, and democratic or their various combinations; (2) that they need to be institutionalized; and (3) that such institutionalization takes different forms under alternative models and in various historical contexts. With this said however, we do believe that the main contemporary institutions of constitutionalism are relatively few. As the 18th century revolutionaries already claimed, and as has become generally accepted since, written constitutions are one such institution if not the most important or even absolutely indispensable. Within such rule frameworks, fundamental and enforceable rights and separation of powers are the most crucial, confirming one claim of liberal and another of republican constitutionalists. Beyond these provisions, judicial review of constitutionality and federalism (possibly all the way down to local government) are important institutions of constitutionalism if less generally mandated. But structurally, the most important institution is a version of the constitutionalist

Populism and Constitutionalism  177 protection of constitutionalism itself, namely the differentiation of constituent and constituted powers, which may or may not be included in written constitutions as amendment and possibly replacement rules. Undoubtedly, this form of differentiation along with both the separation of powers and federalism needs to be policed and enforced. But only a few polities have established, formally or informally, amendment review by a court and the doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendments as institutions of constitutionalism. When they have done so, and even more when a constitution contains eternity clauses, the question of the self-​emancipation of judges from constitutionalist restraint inevitably arises. It can be answered in terms of some kind of demanding override procedure, the hierarchy of amending principles, or perhaps, in extreme revolutionary circumstance, by opening the door to replacement under normative rules other than those of the constitution itself.109 Finally, it can be shown that constitutionalism can be maintained only if at least some of its institutions and ultimately liberal and republican versions re-​ enforce one another. Karl Loewenstein has a less demanding model of constitutionalism implicit in his idea of the normative constitution that actually limits all power holders.110 Yet his distinction of this from paper or façade constitutions as well as nominal constitutions that only map out the frame of power indicates certainly that written constitutions with whatever formal features may not yet be constitutionalist.111 The former, the façade versions, have only the purpose of disguising actual powers. The latter, the governmental map, may come closer to constitutionalism because of possible restraints for lower level powers implied by codification and publicity. But without any restraints for the highest levels, ultimately they too are not constitutionalist. Similarly, having an amendment rule or an apex court or even a table of rights, as many paper and authoritarian constitutions do, does not amount to constitutionalism in any genuine definition. In our view, it is only the mutual re-​enforcement of institutions of autonomy and participation (fundamental liberal and democratic rights) and institutions of separation (constituent vs. constituted powers, separation of powers, federalism, local government) that can yield constitutionalism, in some workable combinations. We are aware that the demand of the combination of all of these dimensions raises a very high normative, ultimately counterfactual, standard for the institutional framework that yields and protects constitutionalism. That normative consideration opens the door to ideas of both authoritarian and, arguably at least, populist constitutionalism. Examining the possibility of the first, M. Tushnet constructs a spectrum involving various degrees of the realization of the principle of state limitation, his key to defining constitutionalism.112 We leave aside that his lowest level, “absolutist constitutionalism” violates his own definition and does not belong to the relevant spectrum at all. There is however a defensible low level he indicates, mere “rule of law constitutionalism” that

178  Populism and Civil Society only satisfies the requirements of publicity, non-​retroactivity, and generality, being at the largest distance from full normative constitutionalism.113 To be sure, if the topic were authoritarian constitutions or constitutionalism we would have to be more careful than Tushnet. While his inclusion of contemporary Singapore on the lowest level may be defensible, many constitutions often described as “without constitutionalism” would not be.114 But it is clear that all the species that we have referred to as populist constitutions or constitutional politics could arguably be located within such a spectrum or hierarchy of the degrees of constitutionalism.115 How is that possible, given our definition of populism with its clearly authoritarian potential that has been realized in many cases?

Inherited Constitutionalism The simplest, though certainly not wrong answer is historical and contextual. Populists either inherit constitutions they cannot totally alter without open illegality as relied on in Peru or make new constitutions in given historical and contemporary contexts that further constrain them. In either case many institutions of constitutionalism will be inherited or re-​established for purposes of internal or external legitimation primarily, but also for the sake of economic interests that can be secured only with a minimum of calculability and predictability. Even if captured or instrumentalized, the very organizational existence of institutions like formally independent courts and federal and local governments can restrain occasionally, and even must do so if the purposes of legitimation and economic interests are to be reliably served.

A New Balance? A more complex, and influential, but empirically less convincing theory would be based on the already mentioned idea of rebalancing popular sovereignty and constitutionalism (Mény and Surel). According to this, the historical balance has everywhere shifted from popular sovereignty to a form of constitutionalism linked to globalized economic liberalism, and populism emerges as the project of changing the balance in favor of popular sovereignty.116 The argument is important for the analysis of the causes of populist success and for the period of populism in the form of a movement, critical of democratic deficits of different types (oligarchic “partocracy,” global displacement of sovereignty, EU technocracy). But this form of analysis, by seemingly accepting the identification of populist government with the people, or state sovereignty with the people’s, cannot predict or even explain the relation of populism as a government or a regime to

Populism and Constitutionalism  179 constitutionalism. At most, the idea of rebalancing can point to the continued attacks on liberal constitutionalism and its institutions, but it does not tell us what kind of constitutional politics populism would pursue once the old enemy is defeated or marginalized. Thus to explain why populists might claim to represent some version of constitutionalism, this second argument would have to rely on the first one.

Constitutional Instrumentalism? Paul Blokker’s idea of populist constitutional instrumentalism is partially applicable to movements that rely on liberal protections to organize, act, and try to come to power.117 It is even more relevant to the stage of populists in government, once the enemy of liberal constitutionalism is gone. This opportunism is best illustrated by W. Sadurski, who shows that the current PiS government in Poland used the means of changing membership and attacking members and jurisdiction reduction and alteration including refusal to publish decisions only until the CT was fully packed. After the latter happened, the restrictive measures were abandoned, and the new Tribunal could be and was used to eliminate other obstacles facing the same government and to strengthen its legitimacy.118

Abusive Constitutionalism This idea is the most critical confrontation with the supposed constitutionalism of populist governments, and helps to flesh out the previous conceptions. The Landau-​Dixon idea of abusive constitutionalism is differentiated in terms of weak as well as strong phases. They define abusive constitutionalism as “the use of mechanisms of constitutional change in order to make the state significantly less democratic.”119 We agree, but think that they miss a key step. While the weakening of democracy can be the ultimate even if unintended outcome, the intervening step of the weakening of constitutionalism itself is inevitable and is more likely intended. The practice can be described as within constitutionalism, because one or more institutions of state limitation and guarantee are used for the purpose. It can be called abusive however, because the practice weakens one or more of the other institutions whose overall balance is required for normative constitutionalism. Lack of clarity about the state of constitutionalism is one result of such abusive practices. Focusing on the institutions used, some interpreters can describe populism in power as a constitutionalism. Focusing on the institutions so attacked or on their overall loss of coherence, would lead one to claim the opposite.

180  Populism and Civil Society Landau and Dixon list constitutional replacement, amendment, and adjudication as the key terrains of abusive constitutionalism.120 Thus, replacing a liberal with a new constitution is a comprehensive opportunity to weaken separation of powers and judicial review. When replacement occurs in a revolution or a coup as in Peru, there is no point in speaking of abusive constitutionalism. Revolutions and coups are authoritarian phenomena. But abusive constitutionalism comes into play, potentially, where there is an authoritarian potential within liberal constitutions, in other words where replacement or amendment rules are undemanding and easily are taken hold of by an executive power. The same goes for unlimited emergency powers that can easily become tools of constitutional dictatorships.121 At its maximum, which has not been often realized recently, authoritarian replacement can suspend the written constitution or reduce it to a mere façade or paper document.122 Or, a nominal constitution, a mere map of the main political powers in the state can emerge, where the powers are arranged hierarchically, and the highest power is unlimited. While the rare change from a normative to a façade constitution would indicate the establishment of a dictatorship in populist colors, the more common change to a nominal one, a power map, would be a sign of the emergence of a new populist hybrid regime. The methods of the latter alteration can however vary. It can take the form of constitutional replacement. Or, the flexible amendment rule can be used involving less comprehensive changes in each round. Nevertheless reiterated amendments can accomplish more or less the same purpose as the making of a new power map constitution. Most often, abusive constitutionalism relying on amendment rules will strengthen the plebiscitary dimension. This was the case in in Turkey where presidential government was formally introduced by amendment, and also repeatedly in Latin America through repeated attempts to secure presidential re-​election. Equally common have been attempts by constitutional amendment to disempower constitutional courts through jurisdiction removal, change of procedural rules, and especially of membership and form of tenure. Conversely, however, as Dixon and Landau stress, apex courts can be instruments of “abusive judicial review” by enabling (weak form) or carrying out (strong form) the weakening or bypassing of other constitutionalist institutions. The weakening of the separation of powers, federalism, local autonomy, and the limits on emergency powers through or by court decisions is the most obvious form of abusive review. But amendment rules can be and often are weakened, as in Poland where non-​constitutional legislation and decrees are allowed to stand and thus change the constitution. Even the replacement power, or one level in the hierarchy of amendment tracks, can be attacked as in Venezuela, where under Chavez, in its decision permitting term

Populism and Constitutionalism  181 limits to be lifted, the Supreme Court allowed the replacement provision to be transparently bypassed through the use of a lower level amendment track. The same happened even more radically in Bolivia where the negative outcome in a referendum that sought to remove all presidential term limits, following the legal use of the amendment rule, was itself declared unconstitutional. Finally, the most dramatic attack on the institutionalized constituent power occurred also in Venezuela, under Maduro, where a newly packed Court allowed the constituent assembly to assume all powers in the state, thus obliterating the fundamental differentiation of constituent and constituted powers, even as disregarding the function for which it was convened.

Political Constitutionalism as Norm? For the sake of completeness, we should admit that some interpreters consider the theory of abusive constitutionalism to be distorted and one sided. According to them there is an alternative and more favorable theory of populist constitutionalism, based on existing theories of popular, civic, or political constitutionalism.123 While the authors of these conceptions (Kramer, Tushnet, Waldron, Bellamy, and Blokker) are admittedly not political populists, it is nevertheless possible that they have articulated normative views presupposed by those populists who are self-​reflective about their actions.124 Or, their positions could be depicted “as the populist constitutionalism of constitutionalists,” whereas the practice itself could then be called “the populist constitutionalism of populists.”125 It is not entirely far-​fetched to describe populist and popular approaches to the constitution as two partially overlapping circles. Thus for example, Blokker advocates civic or participatory constitutionalism126 and thinks not only that there is such a thing as populist “constitutionalism” but that there is a relationship between the two. Admittedly he is not sure whether populist constitutionalism, while located within a democratic imaginary but with a logic toward democratic dictatorship, belongs at all to a democratic spectrum of possibilities.127 More importantly however he believes that the critiques of liberal or merely legal constitutionalism in populism converge with those of political, republican, civic, and popular constitutionalists. Might not the two, the democratic normative theories and the less than democratic political practice, be linked as counterfactual norms and imperfect empirical realization? Such is the conclusion of A. Czarnota and L. Morawski, whom Blokker is forced to strongly criticize.128 In our view, Halmai’s doubts concerning the application of popular or political constitutionalism to populism is right.129 In practice, populist

182  Populism and Civil Society constitutionalist politics is much closer to the abusive paradigm, that Blokker thinks is one sided, than to the positive alternatives of the theorists of civic, popular, or political constitutionalism. The principles the latter have insisted on, namely popular participation in constitutional politics as well as dialogues among the political branches, have been routinely violated.130 But was this also not the case for most historical versions of liberal constitutionalism? Is it still not case, in various degrees, for many constitutional democracies even today?131 Is it not increasingly so in the neo-​liberal period when national citizens lose rights and political voice in favor of non-​political and generally global institutions?132 We have already noted that electoral disproportionality, highly flexible amendment rules, unlimited emergency powers, and high level of executive domination are authoritarian elements in many liberal constitutions. Even more importantly, G. Frankenberg, following the Schmittian tradition, stresses the constituent power and the prerogative or emergency powers as authoritarian moments within liberal constitutionalism.133 We could even add parliamentary sovereignty to this list, when not seriously checked by the conventions of the constitution. Of course, all these authoritarian elements can be weakened or domesticated under liberal constitutionalism, and have been to one degree or another. Thus, if in the case of traditional liberal constitutionalism, following Tushnet, we admitted the possibility of a spectrum or a hierarchy based on the presence and relative importance of authoritarian elements, should we not do the same between the norm of the civic or popular and various actual forms of populist constitutional politics? What speaks nevertheless for Halmai’s critical view, against this latter alternative, is the dynamics of constitutional politics under populism. Under liberal democratic norms, it is accurate to speak of their increasing institutional presence and efficacy historically, if we start with the first liberal constitutions. In particular, both forms of rights guarantees and of political equality have been vastly expanded. While, admittedly, executive power has everywhere grown under liberal constitutionalism, producing various forms of “democracy deficit,” the struggle to limit it is ongoing and with good prospects in many countries. Granted, populist constitutions, first under Vargas and Peron and now in a variety of forms, have not been in effect for comparably long periods. Nevertheless, the teleology of practice has been away from the supposed norms. Thus in cases of left populism like Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, where initially participatory forms were formalized, their importance and viability were dramatically reduced even during the relevant decade or half.134 Indeed reliance on institutions inherited from liberal constitutionalism, such as judicial review and legally regulated amendment rules, has been much more significant for the practice, exactly as in the theory of abusive constitutionalism.

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Constitutionalism of the Constituent Power Finally, in search of an active principle, there is the populist emphasis on foundations and re-​foundations, in other words on the constituent power. Relying on the critical theory of abusive or instrumental constitutionalism we discover no theory, no attempt of justification, only a purely pragmatic logic that leads to different practices in different circumstances. The alternative, the idea that political or civic constitutionalism is the normative theory of populist constitutionalism, suffers from the fact that principles like participation and dialogue between institutions have been decreasingly realized under left populist constitutions, and not at all under right-​wing national versions. Indeed they were eroded gradually even where the written text included such features, as primarily under Latin American populist governments. Moreover, for logical reasons following from populist interpretations of embodied unitary popular sovereignty, neither the dialogue among a plurality of independent institutions, nor the doubling of the will between government and independently mobilized participants can be maintained or supported. As already argued, even if there is an overlap between popular or political constitutionalism and populist politics of the constitution, this can be only in the critical rather than constructive stage of each. The only genuine principle compatible with the populist identity or imaginary, one that seemed to have been promoted and practiced in different forms under both left and right populist governments, is the superiority and dominance of the unlimited constituent power. The origin and institutionalization of the idea of the constituent power was always an important dimension of constitutionalism, both in order to legitimate the rule of law under constitutions in terms of authentic origins and to isolate a domain protected from pragmatic deformation by political incumbents. We must also note that while the idea of the constituent power is increasingly marginalized and limited under liberal and legal constitutionalism, nevertheless as a norm it manages to survive, as testified by constant discussion of amendment proposals even in the United States.135 It is one of the keys to the difference between normative constitutionalism and actual practice under liberal constitutionalism. The differentiation of constituent and constituted, then, could be the one principle that links liberal and “populist” constitutionalism, perhaps identifying them as members of the same genus. Populism however gives a unique, though not entirely new, interpretation of this principle. In fact, at issue are three deeply related principles, as Luigi Corrias136 stresses: the constituent power, popular sovereignty, and the identifiable presence of an entity called the people. The first indicates the type of power involved, the second its unlimited nature, and the third the imagined identity of its agent. When the three are strongly linked, as both in many modern revolutions and

184  Populism and Civil Society under some populist governments, the result is an unlimited constituent power before, during, and above (superior to) the Constitution.137 Moreover, this principle can be found not only in theory, as from some French revolutionaries to Carl Schmitt, but also in the political practice of populist governments. As we have seen in differing contexts like Venezuela and Hungary, unlike the political constitutionalist ideas of participation and dialogue among the branches, there is repeated reliance on the idea of an unlimited form of political power, generally embodied in a leader. It is understood as both prior and superior to constituted frameworks, including amendment rules and constitutional courts, and yet always implicitly present and potentially active next to them. As populists inevitably experience their own constitutions as still too restraining, here the teleology in many empirical cases is toward increasing realization. The ultimate tendency of the populist idea of unlimited, ever-​present constituent power is to obliterate the distinction between extraordinary and normal powers. Granted, we have seen the end result of this only in Venezuela, but the Venice Commission was right to point to the same danger in the case of the repeated use of amendments in Hungary, lifting invalidated statutes and transitional provisions into the constitution.138 While the trend could be described as a species of instrumentalism (Landau139), it is more plausible to think of it as following from a radical idea of embodied popular sovereignty. Thus, given the valid claim that in many liberal democracies the balance has shifted to the constituted powers, with the possibility of democratic constitutional politics assigned only to the past,140 rather than the present, the populist doctrine of the constituent power shifts the balance back to the constituent. But it does so to the extent that it becomes a question whether the constituted powers that exist on paper limit or restrain government at all. The consequences are of course instrumental outcomes on behalf of incumbents, both their action and their political survival. Yet this is an instrumentalism not without possible justification. Undoubtedly the teleology of the absolute constituent power, as Schmitt was the first to claim, is a “democratic” dictatorship, in other words an authoritarian regime type. Yet unless or until it is realized, under populist governments the constituted powers, i.e., the formal constitutions, can be a resource for the mobilization of democratic opponents of populism. Under such conflictual circumstances, it is possible to speak of a weak constitutionalism.141 But this is not the constitutionalism of the populists, but of the opponents or uncertain allies like movements of ethnic liberation142 or international agencies that influenced the initial inclusion of constitutionalist features in populist constitutions. It is not the constitutionalism of the governments in other words, but of their various types of oppositions in civil society, liberal, republican, and democratic.

5

Alternatives to Populism The 2020 US election showed that populism can be defeated. Its Achilles heel is, and always was, reliance on plebiscitary legitimacy that could only be fully attained in elections, as long as these could be assumed to be free and fair. It was a close call, as the leader of US right-​wing populism “in” government made a desperate (comical yet dangerous) effort to leap over the stage of controlling all of “the” government to create a hybrid or authoritarian new regime. The effort failed. But the results of the same election do not tell an unambiguous or definitive story of the defeat of right-​wing populism. While a particularly inept leader figure was soundly defeated, he has received the second highest number of votes in US history. The broad support for his political enablers in Congressional and state elections indicates even more the power of the constituency, with a significant portion of voters supporting the populist attack on “the establishment.” In this setting, leaving aside the obvious short-​term political difficulties, the question arises for democrats: Given the deep division and polarization of the United States (and many others countries), should our political project be an attempt to return to normalcy and restore the status quo ante that seems certainly preferable to the four years between 2016 and 2020? Or, should it be, moving forward, seriously dealing with the issues, many of them legitimate, that allowed the rise of the new form of authoritarian challenge, contemporary populism, in the first place? Our view is the second, even as we support the new president and vice-​ president whose personalities (if not their platforms) seem to suggest restoration, albeit under the formula “build back better,” rather than, as we would prefer, radical reform. Here we can make a proposal for such an alternative only on the abstract, theoretical level. As we will argue later, even in the context of a political project with the legitimate aim of “restoring” liberal democracy, the interaction of mobilized movements in civil society, party, and government can achieve radical reforms. Accordingly, based on the argument of this book, we maintain that: (1) The long, middle, and short-​term problems of the deficit of democratic representation must all be addressed to dramatically weaken the possibility of success of populist demagogy. (2) There is only one answer to the long-​term democratic deficit: democratization as a continuing if never-​ending process. (3) Along with political democracy, the welfare and culture deficits, symbolized by economic inequality and insecurity on the one hand and status decline or insecurity and lack of generalized social solidarity on the other, must be reduced,

186  Populism and Civil Society diminished or, if possible, transformed. (4) To do all this democrats with a small “d” must start with the short term, by supporting on the “demand side” forms of mobilization that converge with these goals. (5) On the “supply side” we must provide theoretically based narratives concerning the goals involved in steps 1–​ 4, and the combination of processes in civil and political society most likely to bring them about. As should be obvious, we are already engaged here in step 5, and to flesh it out is the task of this chapter. We start by addressing the democracy deficit, distinguishing between concepts of popular and populist politics. We then address attempts to redeem the welfare and cultural deficits, by uncoupling the main “host” ideologies from populism. Finally, we will consider the dualistic strategy needed to overcome the deficits in political practice and provide viable alternatives to populism.

Popular, Plural, and Constitutionalist Democracy vs. Populist Democratic Monism The Popular vs. the Populist As Ernesto Laclau did with respect to populism, we too ask the question concerning the identity of the subject(s) that are to address the three deficits, in the long, middle, and short term. The answer “the popular” may seem like a distinction without a difference. Our older answer, civil society, may be right in general, but does not help sufficiently today when both left and right populist movements and forms of mobilization, within civil society itself, are as important as democratic and pluralist options. Even our notion of the plurality of democracies, on which we will continue to insist, cannot glide over the fact that so many electorates—​national, local, and regional—​give their votes to populist leaders and parties.1 We must draw lines that go through not only parties and governments but also civil society. The line between what we will call “popular” and populism also runs through our definition of the latter. Let us recall the main points that can be interpreted in terms of an authoritarian logic. We defined populism as: (1) a political strategy appealing to the fundamental norm of popular sovereignty; (2) a thin ideology (“chain of equivalence”) dependent on ideological hosts; (3) the claim to represent the whole of “the” unified “people” by its mobilized part; (4) the embodiment of the will of the mobilized part in a personalistic leader (or occasionally: leaders); (5) the depiction of social conflict, or “antagonism,” in terms of a Manichean friend–​enemy dichotomy within domestic (and sometimes rooted in international) politics; and (6) involving a strong notion of politics relying on

Alternatives to Populism  187 elections transformed into plebiscites, representation reduced to its symbolic and incarnated forms, and when successful a “constitutionalism” based on the permanent presence of the constituent power. We have indicated previously that the terms of this six-​part definition, in a rigorous argument such as Laclau’s, seem to imply one another. Now we must revisit this apparent concession. The internal relations hold only given the interpretations given to the terms by Laclau and the populists. Indeed, it is through interpretive “tricks” that the supposed identification of “the political” and populism can be maintained. But in fact each term can be and has been interpreted very differently in the history of democratic politics. Let us consider the alternative interpretations of each.

Popular Sovereignty The idea of popular sovereignty was and remains a component of democratic ideology that cannot be eliminated by fiat. Yet as interpreters such as Raymond Carré de Malberg, Maurice Hauriou,2 Edmund Morgan, Francois Furet, Claude Lefort, and Pierre Rosanvallon3 have shown, the concept when linked to notions of real presence, unity of will, and embodiment is not only fictional but has been and remains a dangerous opportunity for authoritarians and autocrats to make claims justifying their usurpation of the power of citizens. Our suggestion, to begin with, is to treat the fiction as a counterfactual norm. But what should the norm contain and require? One possible suggestion is to treat the norm as a negative, as a denial of the right of any person, body, or institution, and by implication movement to claim to speak in the name of the popular sovereign in anything more than a temporary and institutionally limited manner. This was the solution of Carré de Malberg who called the norm “national” as opposed to “popular” sovereignty.4 Without accepting that shift in terminology, Claude Lefort, as we have argued in c­ hapter 3, defined democracy as keeping the place of ultimate power, historically occupied by the absolutist monarch, empty. We accept the idea that popular sovereignty should have this negative dimension but are forced to conclude that it is insufficient to define the category in the sense of a key principle of democratic politics. Lefort himself insisted on political competition, separation of powers, and fundamental rights as the institutional preconditions for keeping the place of power empty, thereby rejecting political theology, the basis for monarchical claims, for modern constitutional democracy. But even these important institutions, on their own, would establish only a very limited notion of democracy, typified by Dahl’s “polyarchy.”5 An important step toward a more positive concept was taken by Habermas,6 who argued that popular sovereignty should be seen as procedural meaning deliberative communication in

188  Populism and Civil Society the societal public spheres, as long as interaction in those spheres was defined by the principle of free and open dialogue to which each member would have equal access secured by fundamental civil, political, and, we would add, social rights. This proposal, breaking with any notion of embodiment, gives new and much needed content to the meaning of the popular, but at the cost of abandoning or very much weakening the notion of sovereignty that cannot do without a decisional element. In Habermas’s conception, discussion in a democratic public sphere cannot be constrained by topic or time requirements, and the relationship of the public to the decisional instances of state and government remain unclear or weak. In this context, Pierre Rosanvallon has taken another step by giving instruments to the public in terms of the devices of “counter-​democracy” to monitor, control, and sanction the work of governmental bodies. For him it is not a fictional unity but the duality of representative and counter-​democracy that yield popular sovereignty. Influenced by many of these conceptions, or anticipating them as in the last case, our concept of the plurality of democracies was, we believe, another key step in redefining popular sovereignty.7 The concept assumes not only normative goals or standards but also a continued process of democratization that in our view is the only way of addressing the long-​term democratic or representation deficit inherent in constitutional democracy. When speaking of the plurality of democracies, we have in mind the combination of different geographical (local, regional, national) forms of representative democracy, participatory forms in functional domains, such as industry, administration, and education, as well the interaction of social movements, political parties, and decisional publics. Whereas Rosanvallon’s democracy is dual, implicitly focusing on the traditional dichotomy of state and civil society, ours is plural, insisting on a plurality of possibilities in state, civil society, and economy. As in Habermas, each democracy involves public, open discussion, but according to our norm there is a plurality of publics as he foresaw in the early book on the public sphere.8 That very plurality produces an empty space free of usurpation, democratic as against polyarchic, as both deliberation and decisional powers are relevant to different instances and never ultimately one alone. At the same time, we assume a constitutional framework that in case of continued disagreement allows for a system of decision-​ making in terms of forms of compromise or, if that is not possible, majority or qualified majority rule. Accordingly, the popular involves a plurality of avenues for voice, action, and participation while refusing both the restriction of popular sovereignty to acts of voting and its re-​mythologization in populist imaginary of the unitary people incarnated and acting in and through a leader. To be sure, the constitutional structure for a plurality of democracies, though foreshadowed by forms of decentralization, federalism, councils and industrial democracy as well as institutions combining representative with participatory

Alternatives to Populism  189 democracy, is nowhere worked out and would in principle allow for a variety of solutions. Moreover, the concept applies in principle not only to the content of constitutions but also to how they are made and interpreted. It is in this double sense of process and result that we speak of democratization. We have logic on our side when we assume that a constitution made and interpreted in terms of the principle of the plurality of democracies would help to institutionalize (probably gradually and through learning processes) a version of this political model. Here our analysis converges with the popular and political constitutionalists already discussed in ­chapter 4. It is they, in spite of some confusion concerning the terminological relation of the popular and the populist, who have implicitly raised the question of their fundamental difference. Ultimately, their objection was to the monopolization of the ultimate power of sovereignty, not so much by the political executive as by the legal bodies of unelected courts and the apex court in particular. Their solution was a dialogue concerning constitutional meaning and interpretation among the political branches, most of which owe their powers to democratic elections, and between government as a whole and initiatives, movements, and associations of political and civil society. Our addition to this conception would be above all the requirement that the instances participating in this process, whether media organizations, unions, voluntary associations, parties, councils or administrative instances, should be themselves democratically organized or, as in the case of judicial and administrative bodies, at least accountable to their constituencies and possibly professional bodies.9 Of course, within the idea of popular constitutionalism, along with the plurality of democracies, are norms that allow many conceivable forms of partial realization. For example, popular constitutionalists and even John Rawls have argued that in the United States communication and interaction between the Supreme Court and political publics have played a role in the evolution of our constitutional interpretation, as notably in the shift from pre–​New Deal to post–​ New Deal and civil rights jurisprudence. Similarly, with respect to the plurality of democracies, the interaction between popular movements, regional, and even national government has been an enduring feature of the legislative process with respect to race, work, family, and gender. Democratization, in terms of the further development and even institutionalization of these forms, would go a long way in terms of addressing the always present long-​term democratic deficit in representative government, pre-​empting populist alternatives. Following C. Crouch,10 we admit that democratization has its “parabolic” high and low points, involving moments of “high democratization” as well as others when democratization is temporarily of little public interest. Indeed, the latter moments can involve blockage and even regression especially under the impact of what we called welfare and cultural deficits. But we note that historically at least even his democratic parabola is structurally progressive, implying secular gains and, even

190  Populism and Civil Society more so, the possibility of new forms of mobilization repeatedly reaching high points of democratization.

From “Thin Ideology” to the Norms of Democracy In our view, in light of the populist challenge, the resumption of democratization has primacy with respect to addressing the other deficits. We understand this process as the linear or progressive parabolic movement forward in realizing the counterfactual norms of popular sovereignty through communication and participation in the public spheres and the building of new institutional spaces for the long-​term success of such politics. In other words, processes of halting democratization rarely lose everything that has been achieved previously. The possibility of resuming democratization lies not only in the long-​term, structural nature of the democratic deficit that leads to the periodic reappearance of the gap between represented and representatives. Equally important is the salience of fundamental divisions in all our societies concerning how to address economic and cultural deficits and the disagreements concerning them. There is not, nor should there be, such division concerning the counterfactual norms of democracy in many societies today, which is the main reason why the attempts of the US Republicans to lamely contrast “democracy” and “republic” and to limit the franchise both before and during the 2020 elections failed and had to fail. Thus democracy (as also Chantal Mouffe realizes) is the metaprocess around which a framework perspective resembling Laclau’s “equivalence” among different and competing demands can be organized and managed. But this ideal should not be seen, as it seems to be seen by Laclau, as merely a rhetorical and instrumental device or, as he and Mouffe at times seem to imply, as attempts to produce artificial unity and unification. More than a mere host ideology, to which Mouffe seems to reduce it, political democracy (as we have argued in ­chapter 4) is a complex set of norms and institutional proposals. Its source as far as we are concerned, as well as its object, is not “the people” as a unity or, especially, an entity capable of embodiment but civil society as the institutional space of plurality, of disagreement, and of conflict as well as of consensus, compromise, and reconciliation. While many social movements can have strong ideological commitments and interpretations of the world, modern political parties, most of which need to “catch all” types of voters and interests, must indeed rely on the construction of “chains of equivalence” among various needs and demands. The plurality of democracies is in our view the alternative to the thin ideology of populism, addressing potential middle-​term crises of representation. It involves a replacement of claims of symbolic representation on behalf of a fictional unitary agent,

Alternatives to Populism  191 “the people” mythically incarnated in a leader, by interest representation in a plurality of publics constituted by popular bodies, institutions, and agencies. Many organized and even unorganized parts of the population can be thus represented, and no part can be assumed to embody and be able to speak for the whole. Moreover, there must be the strongest possible taboo against leaders stating or even thinking that they embody or they alone speak for the mythical entity “the people.” Using Hannah Pitkin’s terms,11 descriptive and accountable forms of representation are involved, but symbolic representation (as in the case of some European monarchs) is reduced to nothing but symbols. Descriptive representation, as in the case of ethnic or racial groups and genders, may be needed to empower those who have suffered discrimination historically. But accountable representation is the key, and it is possible only where elections are frequent and there is sufficient information (real vs. fake news) for constituencies to be able to critically judge their representatives.

Toward a New Political Narrative The plurality of democracies represents an alternative to populism, not because of its content, some of which certain populists may adopt, but because of three interconnected definitional elements. These are: (1) acceptance of the pluralist idea that a part of society is only a part that can represent or stand for the whole only according to legal procedures and then only temporarily and fallibly; (2) rejection of all ideas of the people as a whole being an embodied real presence in space and time; and (3) acceptance of all political actors as opponents rather than enemies. While differing from more limited classical pluralist ideas, the concept of the plurality of democracies contains these elements, which means that modern societies are inevitably divided by a variety of lines of cleavage, from geography and occupation to ideology and worldview. Despite Marx’s early formula, based on an untenable philosophy of history, the interests or ideology of no class can ever be truly universal. Accordingly, political parties seek to organize along some but never all such lines of division. Even together, parties cannot exhaust interest and opinion representation as the pluralist theory has always stressed, insisting on the importance of voluntary associations, social movements, and civil initiatives. The very name “party” reflects plurality, that any such organization can represent only a part not the whole. A one-​party system is logically nonsensical, as the tendency of fusion between party and state in all such systems has demonstrated. Admittedly, the point of multi-​party competition is that each party seeks to be able to make decisions in the name of the whole, legally, through electoral results, under established procedures, whether alone or in coalition with other similar

192  Populism and Civil Society parties. But this form of occupation of the seats of decision-​making under any genuine democracy or even polyarchy is supposed to be temporary, open to critique, and under very significant limits. Whether the latter are constitutional or merely customary and conventional, they must include respect for the rights of other forms of association to criticize and to try to influence power holders and, in the case of parties, the legitimacy of opposition to compete and to try to replace incumbents. The partiality of parties is productive, which purport to pursue their vision good of the whole, not only of their supporters—​is productive and democratic, with these provisos. Even these well-​known and traditional ideas may not be entirely redundant after the constitutional crisis we have recently experienced in the United States, or crises with worse outcomes in countries such as Venezuela and Turkey. But they lead also to a critique of the key populist category—​“the people”—​involving a macro subject that can be really present and act in space and time. Given the number, the multiplicity, and the dispersion of the population, that idea could never be made sense of without identifying the institution, organization, and, in populism generally, the person that not only speaks for the part but embodies the whole. The plurality of democracies, following such philosophers as Lefort and Habermas, must radically break with all ideas of embodiment and denounce its attempts as usurpation. This brings us to the difficult problem of leader and leadership, terms that unlike party do not etymologically imply plurality. This issue is important, because the shift from a part claiming to be the whole, from unitary models of embodiment to principled political pluralism, must not mean the dramatic weakening of the popular as compared to the populist. Indeed, such a weakening would mean that in a competition between the two types of mobilization and representation, the populist would tend to win. Even if in the ideal framework of the public sphere as postulated by Habermas there are only equal participants, empirical democratic politics has always involved leadership and leaders. While this was already a source of critique for the Socratic philosophers, republican and liberal movements too, even when strongly anti-​authoritarian, have regularly involved leaders. When those leader or leaders have charisma in Weber’s sense, even if that is not a requirement, their movements and parties clearly benefit. Charismatic leadership allows the appeal to be extended beyond the always small circle of militants that completely shares the narrative of a popular movement or party. Even within the movement or party leadership there can be significant disagreements that need to be resolved given short-​term challenges regarding strategy or policy. These cannot and probably should not be solved through majority decision-​making, following endless discussion. “The buck stops here” is a vulgarism, but an unavoidable one, that can be legitimately claimed only in the case of a trusted and respected political leader. And yet leadership, especially

Alternatives to Populism  193 with charisma, is not only an advantage but also an obvious danger hiding the possibility of populist personalism. The dangers are not unavoidable, as we have seen in the case of some charismatic leaders like Washington, San Martin, Mandela, and many others who sought consciously to avoid them.12 As these cases show, one remedy, probably the weakest, is on the level of the leadership personality. A stronger safeguard is the already mentioned political-​cultural taboo against the language of embodiment and the reduction of representation to its symbolic dimension. But such a taboo generally develops after a negative historical experience involving the so-​called cults of personality, that is, one-​person dictatorships or authoritarian populist experiences. In such cases, the new leader wishes above all to avoid resembling a previous one. Unfortunately, however, after the experience of democratic division or oligarchic group rule, the taboo does not play the same role, even where it existed previously. Thus, populist personalism is often a cyclical recurring phenomenon as interpreters like O’Donell have insisted.13 The recurrence of claims of embodiment of the will or interests of “the people” may be explainable by the interests of incumbents to have unlimited power and to stay in office indefinitely. The many conflicts over presidential term limits in Latin America, and even the violation of the conventional two-​term tenure by Franklin Roosevelt, demonstrate such interests and inclinations. Under parliamentary systems, the very long incumbency of many prime ministers shows the same. But long incumbency is not identical to embodiment, even if it may use claims of the latter. Such claims however cannot rest merely on the interests of the leader, or only the unlikely claim that he or she alone can do the job. Here is where narratives postulating the political order as the fundamental struggle of friend and enemy play an important role. The relationship between embodiment and intense animosity, the friend–​ enemy conception of politics, is two directional. Either dimension can have priority. Those who oppose a leader who successfully claims to embody the people, its will, and its voice can be easily portrayed and represented as the people’s enemy. But when a political framework is intensely polarized, when one side (or both) imagines its political opponent to be an existential enemy who seeks to destroy it and who must be destroyed, division and conflict on one’s own side too becomes unacceptable. Indeed, such a division would be seen as “objectively” in the support and in the service of the enemy. It is easily imagined that such destructive internal conflicts can be overcome only through unitary, undivided leadership. In the first case the charisma or sacred quality of the leader becomes the foundation for demonization. In the second case, it is the Manichean view of the world of politics that leads to the acceptance of authoritarian leadership that does not even need to be personally charismatic. In many empirical cases, finally, both sides of the causal relationship may play a role. For example, a leader can

194  Populism and Civil Society be charismatic to a part of his “base” as Trump undoubtedly was for many of his supporters, while it is the pre-​existent demonization of the other side that makes another part of his supporters forget all the possible reservations they likely have had concerning his personality and policies. Combined, the two logics severely challenge the system of guardrails of constitutional democracy, based on the idea among others that under such a system all parties and all leaders can lose elections and must accept the results.14 If the opponent of charisma is sacrilegious, or the enemy-​-​a force out to destroy or replace us, it cannot under any circumstance be allowed to win. Political conflict turns existential. We must therefore occupy the empty space of power to make sure the enemy seeking to destroy us does not succeed in occupying the same. But as with leadership, conflict is a necessary feature of democratic politics. As with Lefort’s system with an empty space or Dahl’s polyarchy, the plurality of democracies should be seen as a world of dissent, disagreement, contestation, and even moderate antagonism. In distinction to Laclau and Mouffe, we maintain that logically it is also one of consensus, namely concerning the framework within which conflict itself takes place and remains legitimate. We note that even in war, as the relevant international customs and agreements show, there must be some agreement concerning rules, even as these, like all rules, are often violated. Any violation of these rules is unlawful, and though combatants may get away with such acts, they are also exposed to trials as war criminals. It is the underlying consensus that allows even warring states to make peace, and generally peacemaking will lead to some compromise concerning the issues at stake. The conflict-​consensus-​compromise model, if true for international affairs, must be even more relevant to domestic politics where common interests go beyond the need to minimize loss of life to issues like public welfare and political legitimacy of the order as a whole. Here conflict and discord should not be seen in terms of Carl Schmitt’s friend and enemy relation or Laclau’s demonization,15 even if these concepts do describe frameworks of extreme domestic polarization. It is a common norm of all liberal, republican, and democratic systems that conflict can be beneficial for the polity but extreme antagonism, whether based on ideology, class, race, gender, ethnicity, or religion, must be domesticated. While the avoidance of extreme antagonism is ultimately possible only on the bases of a political culture that has elements of restraint and forbearance, there are fortunately also institutional steps that can be taken to promote just these attitudes. These are related to constitutional designs seeking to block the options of leadership usurpation that are important in the all too likely cases where anti-​ authoritarian personal psychology and all too fragile cultural taboo do not, or no longer, represent such limitation.

Alternatives to Populism  195

The Constituent Power, Democratic Constitutionalism, and Consensus Democracy Popular politics must not cede the terrain of constitutional politics on which populists have placed a great deal of emphasis. While described with some justice as instrumental and even abusive constitutionalism, populism, as we have seen, can also have a principled constitutional theory. It is based on the predominance of an ever-​present constituent power or pouvoir constituant over the pouvoirs constitués,16 a model that has been rightly called “weak constitutionalism.”17 To be fair the idea should not be depicted as the complete absence of constituted powers that limit power holders. There is the implication that rules exist that both enable and limit, but also that these rules can always be changed by the holder of the constituent power. But even this idea is especially pernicious when combined with notions of embodied popular sovereignty and the friend–​enemy mapping of the political field. In such versions, whoever can speak for the people can produce, change, and replace the constitution at will and, in the process of doing so, the voice of the enemy, however defined, can be entirely neglected or even suppressed by the right choice of electoral rules, for example. Nevertheless, the constitutionalism of the constituent power gains its legitimacy under and in contrast to legal or oligarchic forms of constitutionalism. According to critics, these imply in a variety of forms first that it is legal experts alone who have the right to make (and not merely draft), interpret, and change the constitutions; and second, that the constitutional products whatever their merits and demerits are either very difficult to change, or at least cannot be changed through popular challenge and initiative. Popular constitutionalism, or, in the expanded version, the plurality of democracies, shares this criticism. Yet we cannot leave the defense of the democratic constituent power to the populists, nor follow them in their disinterest and neglect of constituted powers. Fortunately, from Condorcet’s 18th century draft and Jefferson’s letters and notes to many contemporary constitutions, there have been important attempts to go beyond the alternative of frozen, oligarchic constitutions that give legal experts too much power through the monopoly of interpretation and populist overemphasis, unification, and instrumentalization of the otherwise legitimate stress on the constituent power. While what has been called popular or political constitutionalism in the United States and the United Kingdom focuses on the participation of all political branches and popular initiatives in interpreting the basic law, in practice democratic constitutionalism has also focused on amendment and replacement rules. Here we cannot consider the many relevant examples from all over the world and will list only the main principles involved. Constitutions should indeed be open to change by the citizens of a political community, but:

196  Populism and Civil Society 1. They should represent a relatively lasting constituted political order, and be guarded against facile alteration, by forms of entrenchment. 2. The level of entrenchment should not be understood in terms of eternity rules, or even very high levels of consensus, but rather the plurality of democratic institutions and bodies needed for amendment. 3. There should be a multi-​leveled set of rules of constitutional change, requiring lower degrees of consensus for technical change and much higher levels for principled change involving “the basic structure,” and especially replacement.18 4. All levels of change must involve significant consensus, the lowest mainly among political parties, and each of the higher ones increasing the role of popular participation (initiative, deliberation, ratification) from the level before. 5. There must be an institution, a court or tribunal, that has the function of keeping the levels of change apart, protecting the constitution from mere statutory change and the basic structure from lower amendment levels. This necessarily means the inclusion of amendment review among the powers of this institution. 6. The members of the institution of review, composed of legal experts, must be nominated by organs independent of the main branches of power. While elections and public deliberation should play a role in the final choice, the candidates must run as independent, without links to parties or political pressure groups. If the legislature is to have a role in the outcome, high consensus among parties should be required. The obvious general point of these principles is to leave a great deal of room for the constituent power and at the same time impart various degrees of stability to the constituted. A second equally important purpose is to include an element of popular constitutionalism on the fundamental level of change. As we will see, a third and perhaps most important role is to defend the consensual dimension of politics, to which they obviously belong. There are many empirical cases, discussed in ­chapter 4, that show the populist violation of many of these principles, specifically 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6. Oligarchic (mistakenly called “liberal”) constitutionalism too routinely violates several of them, for ­example 3, 4, 6, and partially 5 in the United States. This of course means that there are many constitutions, populist and oligarchic, that should be democratically changed even if they do not presently contain rules of change according to these principles, or if containing such rules, like the United States’ provision for new constitutional conventions, these have been historically neglected. But in neither case should the constituent power be conceived as in the state of nature, assuming only self-​authorization in the name of the

Alternatives to Populism  197 mythical people. As some cases of what one of us called post-​sovereign constitution making demonstrated,19 notably the constituent process in South Africa, many of these rules could be assumed initially on the normative political level and then legally established through negotiation and compromise in interim constitutions during the original constitution making process. Of course constitutional politics is important for the theory of the plurality of democracies, because the multiple institutions of participation can and should be established alongside the traditional separation and division of power in constitutions. There is no universal blueprint for what must be involved beyond the system of citizen rights needed to participate whether locally or nationally, whether in political or functional domains, as well as in a plurality of public spheres. But there are also important negative functions constitutions must play in the preservation of democratic principles. The challenge of populism has brought us face to face with two related dangers: usurpation by personalistic executives and the transformation of the political field into friend–​enemy relations. We have mentioned the role (relatively rare) that anti-​authoritarian personality types of leaders and more common but fragile cultural assumptions can play in warding off these dangers, but also that they have been and remain at least very unreliable in the long term. Sometimes, all that must happen for these to lose their force is the appearance of unmet grievances and a radical leader with authoritarian instincts ready to appeal to them, or the passing of time after authoritarian experiences as in Europe, or overconfidence in the stability of the traditional framework of institutions, as in the United States. It is here that constitutional design can play an important function that is preventive and socializing at the same time. Proposals for such safeguards or guardrails are as old as democracy itself. The Graeco-​Roman idea of mixed government (Aristotle’s politeia and Cicero’s respublica) was supposed to play exactly this role, incorporating democratic components but mixing them with monarchical and aristocratic institutions. Today however we can no longer accept forms of authority not based ultimately at least, in a short or long chain, on democratic elections. The traditions of the separation and division of powers, the early modern alternative, can however be linked to the system of authorization directly or at least ultimately linked to popular elections. We traditionally assume, especially in the United States, that it is this system of power differentiation and distribution that makes autocratic rule in the name of the people impossible. Thus while charismatic leadership can emerge in one branch, in either the center or the units of a federal system, according to the traditional model it would be limited and counteracted by checks and balances. Today, after our all too close call with a populist-​autocratic project in the U.S., we should question whether the traditional guardrails are sufficient, given two

198  Populism and Civil Society structural challenges to that model: the modern executive and the contemporary form of the political party. As has been repeatedly well described, from Tocqueville and Marx to Linz and Lowy, the modern executive in charge of immense administrations has gained not only enormous powers but also plebiscitary legitimacy.20 While in the Linz conception it is presidential government based on the separation of powers and direct election of the executive that is especially prone to executive usurpation, from India and Turkey to Hungary and Poland we have seen parliamentary executives gain and abuse the type of plebiscitary power that Max Weber predicted for them based on the rather benign example of Gladstone and Lloyd George in the United Kingdom. When such a figure as Mrs. Gandhi, Erdogan, Orbán, Kaczynski, and more recently even Trump captures and/​or controls a highly disciplined party that purports to embody the true people’s will, the so-​called formal guardrails of constitutional democracy come under severe threat. It could be of course argued, that in the recent US crisis of democracy and constitutionalism the safeguards held after all. While on the one hand the legislature was unable to stop the plebiscitary president even when one chamber was controlled by the opposition, on the other, the courts, despite their packing, the political officials and organs of the states, and the independent civil service (the state administration derided as the “deep state”) held firm. But an explanation focusing on the formal institutions would be incomplete. In our concept of the plurality of democracies, actions by citizens, in the political system, in civil society, and in the public sphere(s) are equally important. The recent attempt at executive usurpation in the United States was defeated first and foremost in elections, not one but several. There was the national election with dramatically high level of participation in the middle of the Covid-​19 crisis, and the symbolically important outcome of the 7 million vote difference. And there were elections achieving majorities in several states considered relatively safe for the presidential incumbent, where the threat to constitutional democracy was commonly understood as one of the main reasons for voting against him. Finally there were the two run-​off elections in Georgia, in the very heart of the old Confederacy, won by an African American and a Jewish American. These electoral outcomes were possible because of extensive efforts at grassroots organization, symbolized by the activity of Stacey Abrams in Georgia but anticipated and promoted by the efforts of other local movement organizers in the so-​called Indivisible, Feminist and Black Lives Matter movements. Equally important were efforts in the main printed and electronic forms of communication to defend “truth” against “fake news” promoted both in some traditional media and, especially, on the internet. In the end, both the institutional framework and the loyalty it inspires in many officials (“constitutional patriotism”) and popular communication and

Alternatives to Populism  199 mobilization were all necessary for the failure of an authoritarian populist effort to subvert the order of the oldest constitutional democracy, that of the United States. The institutional framework and the civil religion of the constitution, historically celebrating its safeguards, were probably the most important factors, in the case of administrators and judges, for resisting usurpation and subversion. The commitment of public officials to institutional norms, legality, impartiality, and the ethics of their profession, be it in an administrative agency or a court, was crucial to avoiding politicization for partisan purposes.21 But taken together with the size of the vote, popular mobilization and the critical media certainly helped to harden the spine of officials who would have had to personally, openly, and visibly attack the foundations of constitutional democracy if they were to side with the incumbent and his highly implausible and inconsistent narrative(s). With the exception of most Republican congressional representatives, this only a few were willing to do. In the end, it was the work of grassroots electorates and of the main electronic and printed media that enabled even the national legislature to resist an attempt at right-​wing insurrection, admittedly one poorly organized and sociologically with a relatively weak base of support. Nevertheless, the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC, showed how close we came to a collapse of constitutional democratic government. In our view, in spite of the outcome such a collapse was possible, but only because of the successful demonization of the opposition by authoritarian right-​wing populists. Here mobilization alone, with the obvious tendency to become two sided, could have exacerbated polarization. Thus constitutional safeguards (or perhaps fortunate outcomes possible under the constitution) had to play an important role as well, socializing and determining the expectations of the mobilized participants and providing legal venues for resisting usurpation. To resist authoritarian populist mobilization, the constitutional order must be such that actors should be able to see each other as opponents, rather than as enemies, even if their antagonism tends to be strong. This is possible if rules are enacted making incumbent self-​dealing nearly impossible. These types of rules have a double purpose. The obvious one is to help block authoritarian usurpation by the top leaders. But equally important is to give confidence to opposition: losing an election must not mean permanently being out of power. Fair financing of campaigns, universal access to the key media of communication, and strong institutionalization of the electoral rights of minorities and of the political opposition are all important in this respect. But independent organs must exist to monitor the conflict and adjudicate controversies that threaten to grow out of hand. Not only the press but also the independent judiciary are necessary for this type of control. To do its job the press, in all its written, electronic, and internet forms, must be itself plural. Monopolies in any of these three domains must be limited or even broken up. As for the courts, while indeed they

200  Populism and Civil Society should not be allowed to become the sovereigns of the system, as the popular constitutionalists have argued, their role remains essential. But they can play this role only if their politicization is avoided to the extent possible, and this means a non-​political form of nomination for relatively limited periods as already is the case in many countries today. However, incumbent government can be feared not only for their documented desire and ability to remain in power but even more for what they are able do while in power. Some decisions that are taken between electoral periods have enormous consequences for the lives of citizens, and many are irreversible. Here the obvious danger is delegative or strongly majoritarian democracy, favored by populists when in power. Liberal safeguards focusing on the rights of citizens, and even the traditional separation of powers, do limit these forms of democratic authoritarianism, but they do so at the possible cost of governmental immobility, without diminishing and possibly increasing the polarization between political forces either in the different political branches and/​or between the majority that elected the executive and the new possible majority outside, or both. The only answer to majoritarianism is what has been depicted as consensus democracy.22 While its short-​term function is to allow decision-​making in which both majority and minorities play a role, thus defending the rights of the latter, even more important is the likely long-​term potential of helping to transform relations of animosity to relations of opposition. Given consensus democracy, the fear of the other side winning elections would be greatly diminished. There can of course be many reasons for political and ideological polarization. Many of them can be diminished only by the practical actions of party leaders, members, and those able to influence public opinion. But majoritarian democracy gives those who fear the other side coming to power strong reasons to adopt the rhetoric of friend and enemy initially for pre-​emptive purposes, thereby fueling similar language on the other side. The only answer is diminish the winner take all character of political competition. The institutions of consensus democracy have been well described by Lijphart and those he influenced, among them proportional representation, collegial executives, inclusion in parliamentary committees, and consensual decision-​ making on many key but not all issues, if the purpose of attaining a majority is not to be entirely lost. We would add openness of governments and parties to initiatives and discussions emerging from civil society and social movements, for which many institutional forms have been suggested. Possibly including these, the scheme for constitutional amendment and revision described here certainly belongs among the most important instruments of consensus democracy. Its importance is again double: while incorporating consensual requirements, even more important is the defense of these when established. This means that the principles of consensus democracy when enacted must be formally located and

Alternatives to Populism  201 defended on the highest level of change, involving the combined action of a plurality of assemblies and instances, elected and popular.23

Rescuing (Some of) the Host Ideologies We have maintained that the “thin ideology” of populism cannot succeed in mobilizing large numbers of people, and especially winning elections, without reliance on much more developed and substantive ideological hosts. If the alternative to populism is the plurality of democracies with its normative contents, institutional projects, and historical references, does this obviously “thicker” ideological perspective itself need to rely on “host ideologies”? Paradoxically, yes, for several reasons. First, in the competition with populism, the plurality of democracies too must be able to appeal to a variety of forms of life and opinion, only some of which will be primarily motivated by procedural questions except perhaps in moments of obvious threat and danger to democratic institutional forms. Second, at a time like ours, barely beyond the destruction wrought by neo-​liberalism, when welfare and cultural deficits, increasing inequality, and new (and old) forms of status loss continue to proliferate, it is not enough for political movements and parties to focus on issues like lack of representation and weakening of the trends of democratization. They must offer solutions that would converge with the demand for more democracy. Finally, the plurality of democracies cannot in general rely on charismatic gifts of unitary leaders nor on the power of mythological narratives. Thus rational programs are needed in addition to inspiring projects, and these can only come from some of the host ideologies populism latched on to that pretty well cover the spectrum of possible alternatives. After all, none of these host ideologies emerged within populist challenges, nor are they logically tied to them. Many of them can and should be rescued from populist adventurers that in any case, more often than not, came into conflict with their hosts. But not all hosts used by populism should be utilized, and not all of them together in eclectic mixes so often characteristic of populist parties. For example extreme neo-​liberalism on the one end and xenophobic nationalism coupled with state sovereigntism on the other are both incompatible with projects of democratization as we have seen in the last thirty or so years. This view still leaves open the number and types of ideological perspectives that should be brought into our primarily democratic synthesis. Without some of the more simplistic conceptions of intersectionality that tend to paper over deep conflicts among constituencies on the grassroots level, the possibility of the easy unification of all just and justifiable demands cannot be simply assumed. There are clearly conflicts on the economic level between blue-​collar constituencies and

202  Populism and Civil Society the militants of ecological movements. On the cultural level, several cleavages open up, e.g., between the beneficiaries of traditional status hierarchies of gender and race and those harmed by them. While abolishing these may be just, the loss of some status advantages can imply new harm and suffering. Finally, while there are very good reasons for forming identities on the universal, regional, and secular levels, some strong and even attractive identities today, bolstered by shared histories, are national, local, and religious. Can all of these options be addressed and accommodated within a unified, rational perspective? The answer varies depending on the context of party systems and ultimately electoral settings. In multi-​party frameworks, linked to forms of proportional representation, it may be enough that each of several democratic parties, who share an interest in addressing deficits of representation by strategies of democratization, choose and campaign relying on different but thick ideologies that they each find especially convincing or attractive. If then some of these parties come to government, most likely in coalitions, the reconciliation of fundamental differences should take place through negotiation and compromise. The situation is different in two or two+ party frameworks, usually based on first past the post or majoritarian systems. Here the “coalition” negotiation must take place within the party of democracy, whether before, during, or after elections. Successful reconciliation carries governmental power in the first type of system, while in the second it also becomes one of the keys to electoral success as we have just seen in the Biden campaign. It may be more difficult to win an election in the first case, but governing will be a greater challenge in the second, especially when burdened by the vetoes of the presidential system of the separation of powers. Our concern here is not with winning elections or governing successfully, and we neglect the differences between electoral and governmental. What we wish to examine is the relationship of the democratic project addressing representation deficits to host ideologies in the area of the two other deficits: welfare and culture. One of these will involve a reconstruction of old ideologies like socialism and social democracy, while others will rely on specific interpretation of new ideological formulations in ecology as well as struggles for gender and racial equality and for national, regional and local autonomy.

The Welfare Deficit and the Renewal of Social Democracy In the period of neo-​liberal globalization, beyond weakness of democratic representation, two other fundamental social deficits, always present under capitalism, are revived and exacerbated: welfare deficits expressed by increasing inequality, new forms of poverty, and precarious existence; and cultural deficits

Alternatives to Populism  203 linked to loss of status, lack of solidarity, and weakening of social identities. Both are related but not identical to the democratic deficit, insofar as the economic and culturally disadvantaged depend on democratic representation and responsiveness if they are to hope to increase their welfare and improve their status. The two forms are also related to each other since loss of economic security and weakening of social status and solidarity help to exacerbate each other. There are thus arguments to be made either that economic improvement and equalization automatically increases status or that restoring community and the social foundations of respect based on solidarity will have beneficial consequences for collective welfare. Without denying these causal links altogether, but not wishing to succumb to either Marxist or cultural reductionism, we will treat ways of addressing the two deficits separately. With respect to the welfare deficit and inequality, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Socialist and social democratic traditions offer a large variety of proposals as well as successful and failed experiments from which we can learn. Populists, and not only the left versions, have been aware of this and have appealed to some of the same sources. That should not lead us to discredit all versions of proposals coming from socialism, especially social democracy, which should not all be simply left to the populists as their host ideologies. Granted, the uniformly authoritarian history of revolutionary socialism and the technocratic, and then neo-​liberal, outcome of social democracy do lead to greater doubts. So do the emergence of new, post-​industrial problems, like the changing structure of labor and the ecological crisis, that have been handled poorly by socialism and even social democracy, ideologies of the industrial age. Nevertheless, in trying to make the generation of welfare and economic development compatible with relative equality under modern conditions, there is no richer and more helpful source than the history of socialism and social democracy. Neo-​liberalism, even in periods of success made possible by the need to dismantle obsolete statist structures, has been from the beginning coupled with dramatic increase of inequality.24 There is something to be learned from the neo-​liberals, especially, as we will see, regarding the importance of property and competition, but the problem of addressing inequality, poverty, and economic insecurity cannot be left to them. So we are back with socialism as a possible partner for democratization processes. But which socialism?25 Given the history of revolutionary socialism in power, it is clearly true that at best some greater economic equality was purchased in these experiments at the grave cost of dictatorial rule and general loss of welfare. Thus we should certainly not imitate those populists, mainly in Latin America and a few in Europe, in trying to revive this tradition with its enormous human costs. Yet from the early stages of revolutionary socialism one idea can be inherited, the distinction

204  Populism and Civil Society between minimum or short-​term and maximum or long-​term projects, the latter freed from the general linkage to violent revolutionary taking of power. At the same time and more importantly, from social democracy, that eventually followed Bernstein in abandoning interest in the long term (“the ultimate goal is nothing, the movement everything”), we must still learn, consistent with the democratic frame advocated here, that both incremental reforms (the short term) and structural, radical reforms (the long term) must be achieved by the means of democratic communication, participation, election, and coalition formation. The long term (revolutionary taking of power) should not however be confused with the values of socialism, inherited from the democratic revolutions, based on the great triad of liberty, equality, solidarity.26 These three values should also guide projects of short-​term, incremental reforms, even as we cannot conceive of a radical, long-​term project that would accomplish their definitive and complete realization. The first value, liberty, linked to civil and political rights, is fully shared with liberalism, while socialism and social democracy have always understood the second, equality, in more substantive sense than liberals. Thus social rights must be added to the list shared with liberalism. Finally, solidarity, neglected by liberals, implies special concern for the weak and infirm, and those with previous histories of discrimination, implying collective or communal forms and institutions to redress these vulnerabilities. Revolutionary socialism abandoned the first of these values, but social democracy adhered to all of them at least in principle. Thus to avoid all misunderstandings so common in the United States, the project advocated here is the renewal of a suitably transformed and updated social democracy. With respect to the short-​term project of a renewed social democracy, the task in the abstract remains what it always implicitly was, namely incremental reforms consistent with the idea of social rights and solidarity with the less privileged and less powerful. This is not a mere matter of providing benefits. Social rights must be also the achievement of those who are to be the right holders. This is why the promotion of the rights of unionization and collective bargaining has been so important for the history of social democrats, and even the US Democratic party. Today however there has been dramatic decline of union membership and influence, if to different extents in the various capitalist countries. Where this happened, the restoration and extension of collective worker rights should be high on the agenda. But worker self-​organization can be only a part of the struggle for social rights. Fortunately, there are many social and political movements relying on pre-​existent organizations and networks that can be relied on in this struggle for equality and empowerment. Of course, the mix of short-​term reforms must be contextual, depending on country, history, and economic level. Where even a low level institutionalization of many social rights has not been achieved, as in the case of health

Alternatives to Populism  205 in the United States, this should be and indeed is currently the first concern of reformers. In countries where this step has been accomplished, attention and financial input can be shifted elsewhere, for example job retraining for the losers of economic competition. Obviously, such social supports for those in precarious jobs and declining industries are also crucial in the United States. Both levels of reform are required for 21st century social democracy to be viable and attractive. At the very least, in all our societies there remain important tasks of reform regarding environmental degradation of the human habitat. Finally, somewhat relativizing the distinction between minimum and maximum projects, we cannot exclude the possibility that in some countries with well-​established welfare states that have not been significantly rolled back, aspects of what will be described as the maximum can be aimed at and realized in the relatively short or middle term. The assumption of all incremental reform is that the capitalist economy largely survives even if in some important areas another logic, one of protection, has been partially introduced.27 With respect to the main domains of production, reformers can and should, however, insist on regulation and taxation. The first is important because of the powerful side effects of that economy and the possibility of costly spillovers into the domains we seek to protect. The obvious example is the negative environmental results of profit oriented production, but drug prices in the field of medicine can hinder efforts to provide high-​level, universal care. The answer here is regulation that can take the form of prohibitions as well as incentives rewarding socially responsible research, pricing, and production. One obvious area of possible incentives is within systems of taxation. This brings us to the second area of interference with the capitalist economy. Social rights are by their nature costly. It is possible to cover the costs in part by insurance models in which the citizens themselves participate, but not all citizens have the means to do so, and thus another part must be covered by taxation of profit, high incomes, and wealth.28 Here reformers must face the obvious difficulty within the neo-​liberal world economy, namely the tendency of an international race to the bottom (“competitive signaling”29) regarding both regulation and taxation, and also unionization. Logically, this area of reform belongs to the short term, but politically it presupposes international collective action established on the level of trade treaties, cooperation of states in all regions on taxing transnational corporations, and perhaps the policy of regional and international organizations beyond these. Thus the task of reformers must be refocused on these projects we could perhaps call middle term, even if for the moment delaying the turn to long-​term socialist projects. Yet we must also concern ourselves in the long term, in structural reforms guided by the three values. The reason is the immense strength of private actors in the capitalist economy that have demonstrated, during and after the social

206  Populism and Civil Society democratic post-​war period, their ability to reverse and in part dismantle previous reforms. It is here that the temptation of state socialist solutions is likely to be revived, but the temptation should be resisted. Structural reform avoiding the historical pitfalls will be possible if we learn from them. The main lesson to be learned is the need to maintain and indeed expand political pluralism and liberal rights, an insistence that has informed our proposal from beginning to end. Social democracy must remain liberal, even as it promotes democratic perspectives in politics and social rights in the economic domain. Additionally, beyond the diminution of economic liberalism implied by social rights, there are important lessons to be learned from that tradition too that have been dramatically confirmed and renewed by state socialist experience. Theoretically summed up under the distinction between hard and soft budgetary constraints,30 these lessons concretely highlight the importance of markets, competition, and real as against pseudo property. We need to apply these concepts to the maximum program, however much that may shock traditional socialists. But we must do so, given the very negative experience of revolutionary socialism that everywhere led to authoritarian states. Therefore, we should generate the content of a long-​ term project from the critique not merely of capitalism but of authoritarian state socialism and capitalism at the same time. The long-​term program of social democratic renewal is guided by our values and by the need to guard the achievements of incremental reform better than has been possible in the past. It has two dimensions, and the logic of our argument is not weakened by the possibility that aspects of each can be and even have been realized in incremental reform projects. Conceptually, it is also possible that the two dimensions should be treated as the distinction between middle and long-​ range programs. For the moment, we wish only to distinguish between their different logics. The first dimension is the removal of specific domains from the capitalist market steered by the logic of profit-​making for the main actors. Such domains are health, education, the arts, care of the old, and now especially parts of the environment: clean air, water, and soil, wilderness areas, and moderate temperatures. Even the labor market and its sanctions must be in part suspended not only by the defense, and in some countries the institutionalization, of the right to organize and to collectively bargain, but also providing for long-​term unemployment insurance and job-​training or retraining. Such removals from the market need not and even should not involve the complete elimination of competition, which should be nonetheless restricted to promote the efficiency of nonprofit oriented forms of satisfying social needs as in the already realized case of healthcare providers in a country such as Germany. The insistence on competition in which public and private providers can both participate is important even here because of the needs of efficiency and innovation. In all these areas, what must be guaranteed is the provision of basic services and goods that can be

Alternatives to Populism  207 attained by all citizens on relatively high levels irrespective of market fluctuation and failure. Not only incremental reforms, but also the dimension of the removal of domains from the profit-​oriented markets is vulnerable to the dynamism of the latter. We are now seeing the threats involved in the case of profit-​making higher education in the United States that challenges public and nonprofit private universities. Many programs of privatization, whether of prisons, militaries, hospitals, transportation, or public utilities, have the same logic. This is where the second dimension of the long-​term program becomes important, the reconstruction of the main economic domain of production. Learning from the experience of state socialism, we must abandon both the fetish of central planning and “public” ownership. Our reconstruction must not abolish markets or a variety of real forms of property or autonomous enterprise. As to the former, it would be easy to claim that imperfect competition has already dramatically deformed markets and we need only to apply anti-​trust and anti-​monopoly policies. Moving in that libertarian direction may be beneficial, but could open up serious problems of macro-​coordination among firms that are mutually dependent yet in competition. It may be that, even as chastened by negative experiences with state socialist planning, we need to affirm markets but also intervention, redistribution, and regulation, not only to stop the formation of monopolies but also to allow the satisfaction of social needs not automatically guaranteed by markets. The solution of the ecological crisis in particular cannot rely on the short-​term, profit-​oriented behavior of competitive units. The category of planning can, however, be rescued from the ruins of state socialism if we realize that it was more a system of binding commands and hierarchical bargaining than of genuine planning, which was only very partially experimented with during the mixed economy of NEP (the New Economic Policy in the USSR I the 1920s). Post–​World War II attempts to introduce indicative planning using Keynesian tools were certainly more promising,31 but even such efforts had no solution to the question “who plans or directs the planners?” in spite of the often used term “democratic planning.” A radical reform program should therefore adopt terms like “participatory planning” and “budgeting” and propose the requisite institutions to accomplish these goals. Regulation and planning should not be substituted for, nor should it destroy, the possibility of market success, without which rational markets cannot function at all or produce efficiency and innovation. Yet private success in the market can be so dramatic that regulation and weak planning mechanisms become ineffective, or are taken over by those who should be regulated and steered. Thus private power in the economy must be both somehow preserved and yet transformed. There are two general ways of solving this difficult problem: industrial democracy and the pluralization of property forms.

208  Populism and Civil Society The first is already part of our proposal for the extension of democracy, but it presents an especially difficult problem in the sphere of the economy. Here, we cannot neglect the dynamism of private entrepreneurship and the important role of expertise. We need solutions combining these desiderata with forms of self-​management and rights in corporate institutions that guarantee voice and consultation with all key stakeholders including workers. Such solutions would not necessarily or even likely involve simply industrial democracy in which all members collectively own firms and decide everything in a single assembly.32 Generally, some version of mixed government or separation of powers would be more desirable, meaning that within each firm, e.g., there would be levels of formulating general goals by management, of expert consideration of the best means to the realize the goals, and the making of binding remuneration and investment decision.33 Such a mixed system of industrial democracy, however, could still lead to the accumulation of great power for some firms, or some combination of firms, and for wealthy individuals. That should be avoided not only for the sake of justice but also to limit the influence of private power over public authorities. The answer often suggested by contemporary market socialists is the transformation of the system of property in capitalist systems where, analogously to state socialism, one form of ownership, namely corporate property, dominates. As already indicated in the case of versions of industrial democracy, a renewed social democracy should aim at a genuine and stable plurality of forms of property in a competitive setting. While we find Roemer’s summary of the options especially helpful,34 we think a future social democracy does not have to make a definitive choice among them. Ownership by workers, by citizens and governments in the relevant locality, by mutual and pension funds and banks whose shares could be distributed to citizens who would be free to exchange them, even private firms up to certain limits of size, and their various possible combinations can co-​exist in a framework of efficient competition.35 It cannot be our task to recommend a specific version of a new, plural, and competitive system of property. Even economists can at best propose a variety of options for political movements, parties, and governmental coalitions to choose from. Short and long-​term success should be allowed to determine the weight of each form in the mix, in part at least, but legislation and state support will be required to set up forms like citizen or worker shareholding that would require time to begin to work in an efficient, competitive, and equitable manner. Nevertheless, if the goal of a future social democracy is to dramatically reduce inequality in society, and private power in the state, a major restructuring of economic management and property, avoiding the pitfalls of central planning and state ownership, must be part of any long-​term agenda.

Alternatives to Populism  209

The Cultural Gap: Status Deficits and the Renewal of Social Solidarity The undeniable success of right-​wing populist politics has been everywhere bound with appeals to the status anxieties of important population segments. The key to this rhetorical strategy has been the deliberate conflation of two sources of status loss for groups previously better situated, usually male and ethnic majority groups: the disorganization and even destruction of valued forms of life by the forces of neo-​liberal globalization and technological change, and the generally successful struggle of previously lower status groups for recognition, inclusion, social improvement, and upward mobility. The puzzle facing progressive, politically liberal, social democratic radical reformers is how to address the very real status anxieties, honor squeezes, and solidarity deficits experienced by key population sectors without abandoning commitment to universalist principles—​ inclusiveness, moral egalitarianism, social justice, equal rights, and solidarity with all groups including minorities (racial, ethnic, sexual, migrant) and women. Care must be taken in the rhetorical appropriation of the useful elements from the ideologies (feminism, antiracism, ecology, cosmopolitanism) so that they can be framed in ways that a large plurality of groups can accept. The two standard responses of the left have been in significant part inadequate. The first involves a counter-​politics of victimhood that mirrors populist identity politics but mobilizes different groups—​historically oppressed “real” minorities: racial, ethnic, gendered, sexual, migrant. This approach embraces identity-​based status politics but dismisses groups on the other side of the divide as “deplorables,” often embracing a self-​righteous political correctness.36 The approach is right in seeking to occupy the moral high ground through exhibiting solidarity with the most or longest oppressed and excluded groups. Where this version of multi-​cultural identity politics goes wrong, along with the political alliances it envisions, is that it mirrors the friend–​enemy populist politics of resentment without getting past divisive identity politics. The latter reinforces instead of tempering the extreme segmentation of civil society and affective political polarization.37 The second approach embraced by some versions of “left populism,” seeks, with some reason as we will see, to return from the cultural to the material axis of competition.38 Its advocates attempt to refocus attention on material inequality and economic redistribution, casting status and identity issues as derivative and distracting.39 Yet, while aware of the mobilizing power of misrecognition, their tendency is to misplace the blame for decades of inattention to rising economic inequality, class issues, and the destructive effects of hyper-​globalization and austerity politics onto those movements and their party political supporters, who sought to redress discriminatory identity-​ based status and material

210  Populism and Civil Society injustices endured by women and minorities. Supposedly, their alleged inattention to material issues lead them to ally with or be used by neo-​liberals (who manipulate identity politics as a diversionary tactic from class issues). Hence the term, “progressive neo liberalism,” to characterize (or caricature) the latter and/​ or to critique their allegedly contradictory synthesis of liberalism and democracy.40 By implication, class is the only real game in town. While the implicit argument involves a helpful revalorization of economic reform, the attempt to find its subject in a class has been implausible for at least a half a century and with the transformation of labor and the world of occupations, has become even less convincing with the passing of time.41 Although we do not endorse politically correct identity politics, neither do we think that status deficits can simply be sidelined or rectified by a materialist reductionist politics of redistribution. Instead, we argue that what is required is an inclusive politics of social solidarity—​one that addresses status issues head on by offering counter-​frames and narratives to undercut the populist resentment politics fomenting affective political polarization. Obviously, it is not possible to revive the status of groups whose occupations and ways of life have been undermined by long-​term technological, social, structural and related cultural change. Nor is desirable to try to restore status hierarchies and privilege based on flawed normative orders involving racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. But it is also unnecessary to fan the flames of resentment by articulating cultural change in a dogmatic one-​sided normative formula that denigrates, cancels, and excludes traditional ways of life. The task before us is to disaggregate what only appear to be seamless political identities on the right (and on the left) by offering alternatives that draw on cogent explanations of structural shifts and make use of shared cultural values and universalistic principles on the narrative/​symbolic level, and take both material and status concerns seriously. There are tensions and rifts in every populist party and among its aggregate groups of supporters that can be exploited by an intelligent democratic politics of social solidarity.42 The way to counter populist resentment politics is to offer alternative “chains of equivalence” articulating demands, grievances, and social identities in ways that focus on commonalities and foster cross-​cutting pluralism and broad progressive alliances. By offering constructive and inclusive social policies framed in terms of shared cultural commitments to equality, justice, and plurality of forms of life, giving voice to all those who feel ignored or unrepresented, a politics of solidarity across status hierarchies could de-​dramatize differences and defuse antagonisms. The point isn’t to appease but to deconstruct the stacked identities in populist chains of equivalence that divide society into two hostile camps and to offer convincing narratives, voice, and real opportunities to groups and regions suffering from the lack of them and fearing status loss.43

Alternatives to Populism  211 While it is not our goal in this book to provide specific policy proposals regarding status deficits it is important to indicate that status concerns can be reframed and addressed, in terms of universalistic principles and general values that are shared across the social spectrum, in ways that can defuse the politics of resentment. We must, in short, confront head on the new hidden injuries of class and provide explanations for welfare, democracy, and status deficits that are cogent, while devising normative frames and projects that can rectify some of these deficits, and counter the scapegoating and affective polarization fueled by authoritarian populists. Above all, we must break the illusory but rhetorically powerful links populists insist on between status loss caused by global economic trends and status gain due to struggles for recognition. The structural economic trends in question cannot be reversed and the status gains for the previously excluded and discriminated certainly should be supported and defended. But compensations should and can be found for the losers, hopefully in morally justifiable forms. We already indicated with respect to the welfare gap that a renewed and this time really universalistic, solidaristic, and inclusive social democratic politics should involve programmatic commitments based on fairness to all around comprehensive healthcare, provision for voice of workers on the job, and infrastructure development involving the newest technologies in rural as well as urban areas. It should also stress visible programs that address job loss and community disintegration when industries or corporations leave an area, coupled with labor market strategies that foster new local industries and invest in skill formation, retraining, and mobility allowances. Such attention to class issues by progressive democratic parties would go a long way toward defusing the politics of resentment and status anxieties by providing new bases of social honor and identity. So would a counter-​framing of the other elements of the culture wars tied up with status anxieties involving gender, race, religion, and nationalism, often framed as hostility to liberalism. The idea is to take seriously the concerns about family, community, and, as we will see, patriotism articulated by those who fear status losses not only individually but also for their group and to frame them in ways that converge instead of clash with liberal principles of individual autonomy, plurality, inclusiveness, equality, justice, and fairness. A progressive alternative to divisive polarization and to populist resentment politics could invoke the values of belonging, moral integrity, family, and patriotism in ways that do not entail hierarchical conceptions of community, patriarchal conceptions of the family, religious monopolies on morality, or sovereigntist racialized ethno-​ nationalism. Commitment to individual rights, equality, and freedom are as basic to our cultural commitments as are community and solidarity. The burden on progressive democrats is to link these cultural commitments to normative orders and projects framed so that they could resonate with most, if not all, groups.

212  Populism and Civil Society For example, as everyone knows, families are diverse today—​many are blended and untraditional—​but most people can support pro-​family public policy if framed in generalizable egalitarian ways. Everyone was once a child, everyone needs schooling, and everyone will need care as an adult at some point in their lives. Pro-​family policies like paid leave for parents, adequate payment or aid for caregivers of the elderly, sick, and young, universal preschool and daycare, etc., are certainly feminist priorities but can be framed using general, universalistic principles. With respect to gender equality, most women and many men whatever their class, race, or religion, oppose violence against and sexual harassment of women. Universalistic principles of fairness can also be relied on for securing gender equality in a variety of non-​family arenas, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed us. Most people support the principle of equal pay for equal work whoever performs the jobs and real equality of opportunity regardless of gender or race—​two universalistic principles. Professionalism on the job (doing a job well) is an important source of social honor for people, whatever that job is, as is the gratifying sense that one is doing needed work or improving society through one’s work. More subtle strategies could revalue the comparable worth of low-​paid jobs in the service industry long coded female—​teaching, healthcare (not only nursing), hospitality, cleaning, working in the food and restaurant business, etc.—​by increasing their compensation and recoding them as socially crucial and important (essential?) work that both men and women do. Adequate education for young people and throughout the lives of adults to equip them with the skills needed to adapt to change can be framed as a public commitment to investing in social capital that benefits everyone. This could address the status anxieties of men who enter these expanding sectors and of anyone needing to learn new skills. The same holds true regarding antiracism. It certainly need not be the case that ending the discriminatory, racist, bases of some groups’ low social status must entail the relative decline of others. The politics of resentment and white supremacy is only one possible response to the efforts to upend the discriminatory and racist grounds of the low social status ascribed to some racial and ethnic groups. If the bases of social respect are expanded for all groups, then a politics of social solidarity could go a long way toward diffusing the racial antagonisms and the scapegoating fomented by today’s populists, which divert us from the real problems and from problem solving. Thus, democrats must confront status and identity issues not only indirectly through economic reform but also directly by devising inclusive alternatives that can re-​channel disagreement into constructive interaction and comprise. Finally, we must do our best to avert one of the greatest dangers to democracy in a society: the loss of shared cultural commitments leading to friend–​enemy politics and affective political polarization over competing status hierarchies and

Alternatives to Populism  213 normative ordering. But this will be possible only if a common cultural ground is re-​established. This means taking back from right-​wing populists and suitably transforming their most important host ideology, namely nationalism, based on the celebration of the imagined community of the nation.44 The national community of the populists is not only imagined but, as the adjectives “ethnic” or “white” and even “religious” modifying their nationalism reveal, it is also exclusionary and illusory. Similarly with sovereignty: the idea of state sovereignty is appealing insofar as it entails autonomy from domination by external powers (empire or imperialism), supremacy (but not exclusivity) of domestic law, and the ability of governments to show solidarity with their citizenry. But the populist gambit of “restoring” sovereignty (making the nation state great again) is either illusionary (if it means autarkic control for small states) or dangerous (if it is just a stand in for empire or imperialism by powerful large states). The task of the political response is to promote and defend genuine, inclusive communities and sovereign equality also within larger federations whose law penetrates domestic polities, based on solidarity and mutuality.45 This means a plurality of communities from the small scale to national and, from there, to the regional and imaginably even cosmopolitan. Local community is potentially the strongest source of solidarity and identity formation but can be promoted only if given a purpose: political and economic. Thus democratic local government and sufficient economic opportunity autonomy are essential. For local communities to avoid isolation along with an exclusionary logic, however, they and their participants who are neighbors must be also members of larger communities of citizens. Thus, instead of devaluing national identity in favor of either localism or cosmopolitanism, we must revalorize its inclusive civic version and foster patriotism (love of country) in the place of racialized exclusionary conceptions of citizenship and national belonging. The political form corresponding to the double stress on the local and the national is federalism, and indeed it can (and in large countries must) include the in-​between level of self-​governing provinces. And federation, as Europeans now know, neither need nor should stop at the boundaries of historical territorial states. This means that solidarity must be promoted and institutionalized from the bottom up, conceivably all the way to the global level. Federalism as an answer to nationalism is an old dream, more often than not defeated by its adversary.46 To counter that trend we must take existing identities and solidarities seriously. We cannot thus neglect the historical power of the nation, of national identity. Yet instead of seeing collective identity in the singular, we must recognize the already strong trend toward the possibility of multiple, non-​competing but mutually supportive identities.47 Today a person can be a local patriot, a national citizen, a citizen of a region like Europe or Latin America, and even a person with a cosmopolitan sensibility.

214  Populism and Civil Society Undoubtedly, allegiance to multiple identities and the practice of solidarity among them has institutional preconditions. The populists promote zero-​sum relations between the nation and its competitors and, within the nation, the supposedly genuine members and the others. But instead of seeing a zero-​sum relation between the levels, it is possible to see each link to a different identity as strengthening the others. Strong local communities can be an important source for the strength for the nation. But so can trans-​national forms of integration, as the advocates of Brexit and MAGA will probably find out. It is not hyper but smart globalization that “lifts all boats.” But the latter is only possible if institutions are established or transformed to avoid destructive competitive races to the bottom and develop coordinated policies. It is not impossible to imagine arrangements that would make different levels of federalism possible, even if the political projects to accomplish these are today partial at best. But to make progress, the challenge of new forms of authoritarianism must be met, which can be done only if we begin to successfully deal with the causes that have made the 21st century, so far, the epoch of populism. That takes us back from speculation to politics.

Civil Society and a Dualistic Strategy In our 1992 book, Civil Society and Political Theory, we argued for a dualistic political strategy. This would involve combining the struggle for influence by associations, movements, and initiatives in civil society and the civil public sphere with the exercise of power by parties in political society, publics, and government. The civil society argument has had a distinguished career since then. Yet it was always contested by both advocates of normal politics as well as supposed revolutionaries. Recently, Colin Crouch too has strongly criticized a monistic, exclusively civil society focused version of the argument, taken from authors such as Robert Putnam and John Keane, implying its elective affinity with neo-​liberal anti-​politics and charging it with neglect of the important domain of political parties.48 Our version of the theory was however not vulnerable to such a critique, and we note that Crouch himself has come to advocate a dualistic strategy relying on a combination of movements and renewed parties in a version we can still support.49 Here too, in fighting populism we might ourselves be accused of populism, thanks to the wide range of understandings and misunderstandings of the concept. It is moreover true that there are populist movements and populist parties that in some settings interact and mutually support one another. Nevertheless, our conception of both sides of the movement-​party dualism is radically different than in populist versions. First, on the definitional level we argue that democratic

Alternatives to Populism  215 movements and parties should not and generally do not understand themselves as parts that incorporate the whole of the popular sovereign, should not and generally do not see their opponents as enemies to be destroyed, and should and generally do understand both civil society and party system as two pluralities in principle, rather than seeking to unify them. Neither democratic movements nor parties should have, and generally do not have, leaders who claim to embody the mobilized parts, asserting their infallibility and immunity to criticism. Second, and more important here, the relation between movement and party is different for democratic politics than populism. While populism can operate on both levels, given self-​understandings as the embodiment of popular sovereignty, populist movements by their logic at least must seek to become political parties wielding power even if they maintain an anti-​party rhetoric. Accepting reliance on mere influence can be at best a reluctant necessity. On the other hand populist parties, whether originating from movements or from older parties or “outsider” political entrepreneurs, have documentable difficulties in tolerating independent movements. When outside governmental power, movements will be tolerated by such parties mainly to support electoral efforts. But when exercising governmental power, independent movements will be often demobilized, transformed, or incorporated in the party apparatus. A dualistic strategy and apparent forms of self-​limitation may be relied on by populists, but only for instrumental reasons that resemble their related attitude to constitutionalism. On the contrary, the dualistic politics of democracy, as we understand it, affirms pluralism and self-​limitation on both the level of movements and parties and for principled reasons. Yes, democratic movements like the Greens do sometimes form political parties, but this always strongly contested decision50 is coupled with the affirmation of independent movements and initiatives outside the new party. Such a decision can be justified when a set of vitally important issues is excluded by the phenomena of cartelization among the existing parties. But such a shift can justify neither the abrogation of dualism of the two levels nor of pluralism within each. Even after party formation of a democratic movement, or its entry into an existing party system, these features of “dualism” and “pluralism” remain important for several theoretical reasons. The first is based on our response to the four deficits of democracy, welfare, status, and identity with four narratives: the plurality of democracy and democratization, the renewal of social democracy, the redeeming of status loss by solidarity, and the pluralization of identity. Some of these narratives have pluralistic components even internally, as indicated by the presence of economic interests and ecology in any viable renewal of social democracy, of gender and race in the struggle for status and solidarity, and of local, national, regional, and global orientations within struggles to restore identity. Even a grand movement for democratization will have militants aiming at the transformation of different

216  Populism and Civil Society levels: local and national, industrial and political. It is not to be excluded on the level of movements that one such great mobilization could be strongly motivated regarding all these issues. Nevertheless, as the concept of “single issue” movement indicates, the likelihood of continued radical pluralization is much greater than the likelihood of unification, which is necessarily temporary and always conflictual. Given this state of affairs, when one movement becomes a party, it is at best a segment of the pluralistic field of mobilization that will be lifted into potential or actual political power. A democratic society should continue to provide opportunities for the influential voice of all opinion and interest capable of speaking in the public sphere, whether by political mobilization or cultural communication. Thus even when a movement becomes a party, the movement form remains important for representation in the most general sense of giving voice to other civil and potentially political constituencies. Second, when a movement becomes a party in a democratic setting, its interests shift from a combination of concerns that includes long-​term projects of structural reform, to primarily the short term, with a focus on incremental change. Whether because of electoral needs requiring an appeal to much wider constituencies than the mobilized, or the needs of operating in parliamentary coalitions or under separation of power systems, the democratic party in power must turn pragmatic and seek the achievable “good” rather than the remote “perfect.” All parties that come to power are bound by this logic, as the history of social democratic reformism, and also of the US Democratic Party, has repeatedly demonstrated. Even revolutionary parties, as Lenin’s during NEP, are forced to shift from maximal to minimum programs. We should not lament this fact, especially if we value short-​term reforms, as indeed we should. But we should not, as already argued, accept the formula that “the goal is nothing.” This means that the long-​term project, even within a single narrative like democratization or the renewal of social democracy, can be elaborated, defended, and fought for primarily on the level of civil society and civil publics by combinations of movements, educational institutions, media outlets, and critical intellectuals. All of these actors should take seriously the role of parties in power and try to influence them, at the very least to adhere to their short-​term programs and promises. But maintaining the tension between values and policies, in the long and short term, is a civil society based task. Third, there are forms of redress of cultural deficits in particular that cannot be effectively addressed on the level of legislation or governmental policy. While aspects of the loss of status can be dealt with on the level of the system of education, the role of societal discourse, cultural discourse whether formal or informal, in the press or in voluntary associations may be more important with more lasting results. The generation and thematization of new needs, values, and possible institutional solutions, too, is first and foremost the role of cultural

Alternatives to Populism  217 discourse in civil and educational publics. We cannot expect parties in the political system to play an originally creative role in this area, only at best one of transmission and help in eventual institutionalization. We agree, and always have agreed, with the notion that movements are “the seedbeds of future democratic vitality.”51 Fourth and finally, parties are themselves relatively weak with respect to some dimensions of the political system, dimensions of expert state administration, and the officials (judges and prosecutors) of the legal order all the way up to constitutional court judges. The same is even more true with respect to private economic powers that, within short-​term reform programs at least, are only weakly responsive to regulation and incentives. While ways can be found to check abuse of power on the levels of the state and the legal system (legal procedures for the state, political mechanisms for the judges), in general their independence from party politics is a virtue not a vice. As we have just seen in the United States, it was the resistance of officials and judges, among other factors, that has brought an effort at political usurpation by a populist leader, supported by his own party, to a grinding halt. Nevertheless, the adherence of state and judicial actors to societal norms, and not only to the law, is very important. Both interrelated domains are constantly evolving, and judges and officials must be brought to awareness concerning changes. As interpreters, from the popular constitutionalists to Rawls and Habermas have stressed, on the bases of both empirical evidence and normative considerations, democratic opinion formation not only leads to changes of cultural assumptions but can strongly influence interpretations of non-​ political functionaries. This means that mobilization on behalf of rights, whether of population segments exposed to discrimination, or the victims (actual or potential) of environmental degradation, remains especially important in domains insulated from the inputs of direct political power. The same is true for holders of private economic power, whose relative independence from political decision makers can be a source of efficiency and innovation. Nevertheless, under capitalism these actors obtain and retain much influence over formal political decision making, gaining too much power in spite of some regulation and taxation where these exist. These same actors however can be surprisingly vulnerable to the monitoring and critical activities of “counter-​democracy” in civil society and the public sphere. Indirectly, these latter forms of influence make it more likely for political parties in government, often limited by state, judicial, and corporate actors, to be able to embark on paths of greater regulation of self-​regulation and of incremental and even structural reforms. The dualistic strategy we support is a double answer to populism. It is so for two reasons. Action on the levels of both civil and political society is the condition of possibility of short-​term reforms providing alternatives to populist promises and also of longer term changes whose aim is to remove the justifications for populist

218  Populism and Civil Society critique and challenge: political oligarchy, social economic precarity and inequality, and cultural alienation. Equally important however is the provision for a significant channel of mobilization on the grassroots level. Mobilization can be promoted of course for its instrumental aims, but it can be valued in and of itself as a fundamental democratic form. Whatever the political system in modern societies, the business of rule has become an elite affair. Accountability, descriptive representation, federalism, and the plurality of representative organs can diminish elitism, but cannot eliminate it. Reviving “the party on the ground” by recruiting members and activists to work locally to educate people about the party’s program, to listen to their concerns, and to mobilize them to vote and participate is an important alternative to the populist movement party form and its plebiscitary politics, as Stacy Abrams showed in Georgia. But it is illusory to try to revive the old mass membership party form in the epoch of catch-​all parties. The majority cannot participate in the activities of politics on a full time basis. It is true that even in moments of high mobilization it is ultimately only large minorities of the grassroots that become active, and their number always declines after the predictable peaks of the process. The movement form, along with the informal voluntary associations and the formal institutions of civil society, plays the role of organizing many of the unorganized and providing public venues where they can more regularly articulate their opinions and needs, and learn from those of others. Equally important, movements can play a decisive role in re-​mobilization on the mass scale when the defense of what has been already acquired is needed or the claim of new rights becomes possible. The cycle of mobilization allows new members and constituencies to become parts of active, participatory minorities. While populism does not always, or even generally, arise from below, its political success depends on the movement form. Of course, authentic mobilization may be channeled by populist parties and replaced by populist governments with top-​down pseudo-​movements. Nevertheless for many, populist movements and even movement parties not only channel their resentments but provide venues for participation with the supposed aim of achieving collective control of our and their lives. The point of the dualist strategy is not only to eliminate or reduce the grievances that give rise to resentment, and the imagery of enemies in society, but also to satisfy the legitimate need for participation in collective action. Indeed this need should be and can be more authentically satisfied by pluralistic movements in civil society than by populist leaders and parties. Even beyond reform, incremental and structural, the plurality of democracies with its stress on process and participation is the genuine alternative to populism. Providing an alternative to populism is a relevant, normatively important task even where there is no currently significant populist challenge, an increasingly rare state of affairs. Once there is such a challenge, the task is not only theoretical

Alternatives to Populism  219 but also political and strategic. This dimension of political response is deeply related to the form populism takes: movement, party, in government, the government, or hybrid regime. As long as populism is only a movement or a movement party, the only legitimate and effective response is self-​organization, whether of democratic movements or new parties or the democratization and revitalization of existing forms of organization. Mere suppression cannot be justified under a constitutional democracy. Since however populists must contest elections, electoral activity remains the ultimate instrument at this stage. But elections and party competition also remain important when populists occupy one branch of power. That they can be defeated is shown by the example of the United States in 2020 and 2021. The task becomes much more difficult when populists occupy the whole of government or become “the” government as currently in places like Hungary and Turkey. Not only electoral activity as such but the struggle to make elections free and fair again now becomes the key stake. Here the role of grassroots movements, alternative media outlets, and international instances becomes more important than that of political parties. The latter must also participate in civil society level activities before they can again fully compete for governmental power. The problem of defeating a populist project is self-​evidently the most difficult on the regime level. We do not have to address the possibility, nowhere yet realized, that a populist government may be able to establish and institutionalize a purely authoritarian form. The politics of defeating such a project can only take the form of revolutions, whether radical or self-​limiting. Unfortunately authoritarian coups, too, will remain possible under such an authoritarian regime, in formation or already in place. The problem of replacement is paradoxically more complicated when the new populist regime is a hybrid—​the form currently aimed at (and even accomplished) by many populist projects. Under a hybrid populist regime, there will be still elections as in every empirical case today. But they will not free and fair, and, as we have seen in Venezuela, their results can be disregarded. Yet, revolutionary mobilization, e.g., a “color revolution,” would be depicted by regime defenders as itself authoritarian and undemocratic, as is routinely done in Russia today. In such a setting moreover the oppositions can only lose elections, and yet if they respond by boycotts, they only increase the legitimacy of populist regimes. It is not easy to suggest a strategy for democracy in such a new and complex political setting. As a preliminary answer, though, we raise the possibility that it may be still possible to learn from the long-​range strategies that have brought down several authoritarian forms in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, from Spain to South Africa. Such projects, too, occurred in hybrid settings, though mostly different from our current populist regimes.52 In general they have had spaces for potential civil society organization that could be expanded. They were not

220  Populism and Civil Society entirely closed to open public information and communication, whether through underground literature or international contacts. Governmental forces in each of these settings included a reformist element, whose role became more important with economic crises and disruptions. Many were in geopolitical neighborhoods that included some political democracies. So, yes, the strategy under populist regimes should still be dualistic, aiming at the exploitation of whatever electoral possibilities remain by parties or similar organization. But the short-​term emphasis should be on the rebuilding of civil society—​its associations, publics, and movements. That strategy succeeded in many countries once. It should be able to succeed again against regimes that may be ultimately weaker and more vulnerable than the authoritarian forms that were defeated a few decades ago. Of course it is easier to stop the populist challenge at its earlier stages. But authoritarian and especially hybrid regimes remain vulnerable, especially since the promises they relied on in coming to power are usually not kept, and perhaps cannot be kept. Rather than dreaming of a restoration of earlier states of affairs, which enabled the rise of populism in the first place, the best weapon for those who oppose this old/​new authoritarian project is to provide convincing and better democratic alternatives.

Notes Preface and Acknowledgments 1. This text was written during the 1980s and published in 1992.

Introduction: Defining Populism 1. Already our focus in Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 2. Colin Crouch, Post-​Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Colin Crouch, The Globalization Backlash (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 3. The distinction between the logic of populism as derived here and its empirical forms of appearance will be fundamental for this work. We understand the latter, in terms of: (1) Historical givens like the type of regime in place (autocratic, oligarchic or formally democratic); (2) Forms of organization necessary and possible under different political conditions beyond regime type, e.g., electoral rules. We will attempt to move back and forth between these two levels of analysis. 4. Theodor Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Jürgen Habermas, “Bewusstmachende Oder Rettende Kritik?,” in Kultur Und Kritik—​Verstreute Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973). See Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society (Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). 5. Eric Hobsbawm affirms this in the case of the related phenomenon of nationalism, neglecting the historical significance and even intellectual power of Mazzini, Kossuth, Palacky, and Masaryk. See Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018); Margaret Canovan, The People (London: Polity Press, 2005). 7. Marx did not run that risk with political economy as his target, since Schmitt, Ricardo, Malthus, and others were both normative and empirical analysts. 8. As will be clear, with Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), we consider US agrarian populism and the Russian Narodnichestvo as pre-​populist. For the contrary thesis see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); whose reconstruction in our view leads in the end to an unhelpful inflation of the concept.

222 Notes 9. On this debate, see Carlos De La Torre, ed., Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), chap. 1–​4. 10. Andrew Arato, “Political Theology and Populism,” Social Research 80, no. 1 (2013): 143–​172, and in Carlos De La Torre, The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015); and the excellent study by Enrique Perruzzotti, “Laclau’s Theory of Populism: A Critical Review,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019). 11. See especially Canovan, The People, 65ff. 12. This perspective, developed by Laclau, On Populist Reason, chap. 4, corresponds to Cas Mudde’s concept of “thin ideology.” See Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 13. Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967) whose theory Laclau adopts in a dramatically foreshortened version in Laclau, On Populist Reason, 159–​161. 14. Canovan, The People, chap. 4. 15. This point, with which we agree, is stronger in Laclau than in anyone else. See for example Carlos De La Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 100. 16. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1928, 1932] 1996). 17. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 83ff. 18. De La Torre’s “Manichean relation”; see Carlos De la Torre, “Global Populism Histories, Trajectories, Problems, and Challenges,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019). 19. We will deal with the issue of the authoritarian logic inherent in the definition in ­chapter 1 of this text. 20. Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1928); Joel I. Cólon-​Ríos, Weak Constitutionalism: Democratic Legitimacy and the Question of Constituent Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2012). Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 2016. 21. Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making; and the Adventures of the Constituent Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 22. Jan-​Werner Müller, What is Populism? (London: Penguin, 2017). 23. Mudde and Kaltwasser argue for this type of definition, but a different one than here. They leave out part/​whole and incarnation. See: Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, “Explaining the Emergence of Populism in Europe and the Americas,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 189–​227. 24. For both see Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 14–​15, 22–​24, 30, which almost fully anticipates today’s populist moment. 25. See Kaltwasser, “Emergence of Populism”; and Cas Mudde, “Conclusion: Some Further Thoughts on Populism,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 26. Finchelstein, Fascism to Populism. His criteria are strongly formed by Peronism.

Notes  223 27. Kenneth M. Roberts, “Populism, Political Mobilization, and Crises of Political Representation,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 28. See c­ hapter 2 of this text for more on the issue of populism as distinct from other social movements in civil society. 29. To be sure, Laclau’s theory could be interpreted as a strategic one, insofar as it is focused on the construction of a political identity (the people) through a chain of equivalences in order to foster their mobilization, to acquire governmental power and hegemonic dominance. Arguably Chantal Mouffe does precisely that in Left Populism, 71. 30. Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 31. Kurt Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 323. 32. See Nadia Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019). Indeed neither he nor Mouffe analyze populism in power. 33. On this see c­ hapters 2 and 3 of this text. 34. Benjamin Moffitt, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016). 35. Compare Roberts, “Political Mobilization,” 142–​145. Elsewhere he defines the phenomenon “as a political strategy for appealing to mass constituencies where representative institutions are weak and discredited,” a version even more open to the blurring he criticizes. Cited by De La Torre, Promise and Perils, 7. 36. A version of the strategy (or “project”) argument, by Robert Jansen, shows that it can be expanded well beyond minimalism: “populist mobilization [is] any sustained, large scale political project that mobilizes ordinarily marginalized societal sectors into publicly visible and continuous political action, while articulating an antielite nationalist rhetoric that valorizes ordinary people”; Robert S. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization; A New Theoretical Approach to Populism,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 169. 37. We will neglect thereby important issues like the common pattern of anti-​pluralism and the goal of mobilization that can be derived from the main elements of the Laclauian definition. See William A. Galston, Anti-​Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); and Jansen, “Populist Mobilization,” 159ff. Jansen is of course right: populist rhetoric should be taken seriously only when linked to actual or potential mobilization. This too is however strongly implied by several dimensions of the elements we derive from Laclau, On Populist Reason, whose idea of rhetoric and discourse are strongly practical. 38. Pitkin, Representation; Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 39. Finchelstein, Fascism to Populism. 40. We note that Mussolini’s government never formally abrogated or replaced the Statuto Albertino nor did Hitler’s the Weimar Constitution. Curiously, in spite of

224 Notes many violations, some ritualistic adherence to certain provisions continued, like the formal repassing (twice) of the Enabling Act by the purged Reichstag. 41. See Karl Loewenstein, “Reflections on the Value of Constitutions in Our Revolutionary Age,” in Constitutions and Constitutional Trends Since World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1955), 203–​206; who distinguished normative (i.e., constitutionalist), semantic (i.e., façade), and nominal (i.e., power map) constitutions. On the role of constitutional politics in populism see our c­ hapter 4 in this text. 42. Zedong Mao, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1959). Since Communists too at certain moments participate in elections, the fundamental distinction here is ideological: thick vs. thin. But, not only Lenin’s but also Trotsky’s work is full of populist elements, even though Trotsky was the most serious Marxist theorist among the Leninists. Here is a check list from The History of the Russian Revolution (1930, 1932): (1) References to popular sovereignty and the people (check); (2) Part–​whole dialectic with its focus on the proletariat (check); (3) Friend–​enemy logic with its demonization of opponents (check); (4) Personalization of leadership (check, though never uncritically!); (5). Foundational politics (check). 43. Even more clearly, especially in peasant countries or in countries with a weak industrial working class, Bolshevism too switched from class to people, as did Lenin’s (and Mao’s) terminology repeatedly (“democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants”; “people’s democratic dictatorship”) and as the term People’s Democracy or Republic also indicates. Also, in no period did a significant communist movement or government lack leadership embodied in one person. Moreover, in relationship to the Marxian philosophy of history, Bolshevism also entailed the voluntaristic skipping of historical stages, rationalized in Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution that was however abandoned in the more “populist” autarchic formula of socialism in one country where industrial workers were still a minority. Indeed, the autarchic, import-​substitution policies of many populist governments found their counterparts in communist economic policy in roughly the same historical period. Finally, in the contemporary period, with the collapse of the plausibility of the classical Marxian theory of capitalism, revolution, and the proletariat, many remaining communist parties become indistinguishable from new populist initiatives, as Jean-​Paul Sartre inadvertently depicted decades ago. See Jean-​Paul Sartre, The Communists and Peace (New York: Georg Braziller, 1968). 44. Interestingly, while in populist cases the role of electoral victory is direct, in the Italian and German fascist cases the role of the head of state (the king and Hindenburg) was necessary to carry out the legal revolution. See Karl D. Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Consequences of National Socialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973); Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (New York: Pickle Partners Publishing, 2018). 45. Felipe Burbano de Lara, “Populist Waves in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 444. 46. Urbinati, Me The People.

Notes  225 47. Roberts, “Political Mobilization.” 48. On this see c­ hapter 3 of this text. 49. Roberts, “Political Mobilization.” Also Jansen, “Populist Mobilization.” 50. The criterion applies also to “competitive authoritarianism,” that we distinguish from the populist regime through their different origins and the role of mass mobilization under populism (see c­ hapter 2 of this text). See Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 334–​350; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 51. See essays by Mudde, “Further Thoughts,” and Kaltwasser, “Emergence of Populism.” 52. Cas Mudde, “The Populist Zeitgeist,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 4 (2004): 541–​563, doi:10.1111/​j.1477-​7053.2004.00135.x. 53. Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, “Civil Society, Populism and Religion,” Constellations 24, no. 3 (2017): 283–​295, doi:10.1111/​1467-​8675.12312. 54. Mouffe, Left Populism. 55. For example, leaving a truly Manichean conception behind, the enemy must be dramatically redefined, as mere antagonist, never clearly distinguished from opponent. Mouffe, Left Populism. 56. Laclau, On Populist Reason, chap. 5. 57. Schmitt, The Concept. 58. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 83ff. 59. De La Torre’s “Manichean relation” in De La Torre, “Global Populism.” 60. This distinction has been stressed by Roberts, “Political Mobilization”; and Jansen, “Populist Mobilization.” 61. To our knowledge Carlos De La Torre was the first to insist on the distinction between populism in opposition and in power. See: De La Torre, Promise and Perils. In several articles we followed this, as did Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured (Harvard University Press, 2014). We have however since moved, first to a three-​part organizational model (Movement, Government, Regime: see https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v=hUQaMqo96-​E) and then, in this work, to a four-​part model (Movement, Party, Government, and Regime). We pay attention also to the distinction between in government and the government, as in endnote 61, but populism as the government is arguably very close to the form of a hybrid regime, competitive authoritarianism, a threshold being passed when a government can no longer lose a national election. 62. This is a key distinction stressed by Zsolt Enyedi and Stephen Whitfield, “Populists in Power: Populism and Representation in Illiberal Democracies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 63. To some, the possibility of the party in power losing an election is the minimal definition of democracy. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). We believe that even under a hybrid form that is distinct from democracy, populists can still lose elections. We have seen this on the national level in Venezuela and the local level in Hungary and Turkey.

226 Notes Losing an election can be an important motivation for constructing a no longer hybrid authoritarian regime, as in the case of Maduro in Venezuela. 64. Populism involves demagogy but is not reducible to it.

Chapter 1 1. See Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988), chap. 4–​6; Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 48–​57. 2. Gino Germani, Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1978), 5–​7. For a short summary see Manuel Anselmi, Populism. An Introduction (New York/​ London: Routledge, 2018). We rely on two related conceptions. They are Kirk A. Hawkins, Madeleine Read, and Teun Pauwels, “Populism and Its Causes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Kenneth Roberts, “Left, Right and the Populist Structuring of Political Competition,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 150. Both however have only two stages of causation, middle and short term, and neglect what we ourselves, with Germani, call the long term. But, Hawkins’s “economic” view of the middle term and Robert’s political analysis of both the middle and short terms are, as will be seen later in the chapter, more useful than Germani’s for understanding contemporary populism(s). 3. We also differ from Germani in insisting on the hybrid (authoritarian and democratic) nature of populism even as a regime, thus distinguishing the phenomenon from the genus of authoritarianism. 4. Dani Rodrik has moved toward a somewhat analogous conception of the causality involved. See Dani Rodrik, “What’s Driving Populism?,” Social Europe, 2019, https://​ www.socialeurope.eu/​whats-​driving-​populism. Our conception however is different. In his case, the long term is understood as cultural, and the middle term as economic shocks. For us the long term is the political contradiction of liberal democracy that Rodrik also recognizes, while we see the middle also based on political crisis tendencies (deficits) exacerbated by economic shocks that he stresses. See Sharun W. Mukand and Dani Rodrik, “The Political Economy of Liberal Democracy,” The Economic Journal 130, no. 627 (2020): 765–​792, doi:10.1093/​ej/​ueaa004. 5. We of course admit the existence of democratic forms of nationalism and socialism, in distinction to fascism and “communism.” We want to leave open whether such a version is possible for populism as well. Is populism that targets the contradiction of liberal democracy different from socialism and nationalism, which could adapt to liberal democracy for the sake of their primary goals? Empirically of course, it is possible that populism can be reconciled with liberal democracy, perhaps even deepen it. But would it remain populism in that case? The question has already arisen for Podemos in Spain and MAS in Bolivia.

Notes  227 6. See Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 7. We see the challenge of post material values as a special case of middle-​term challenges, helping to produce the backlash they speak about. See Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, “Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-​Nots and Cultural Backlash,” SSRN Electronic Journal (2016). doi:10.2139/​ssrn.2818659. 8. Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 186–​194. 9. Ibid. 10. Cecilia L. Ridgeway, “Why Status Matters for Inequality,” American Sociological Review 79, no. 1 (2013): 1–​16, doi:10.1177/​0003122413515997. 11. For the long-​term trends associated with the “silent revolution” in cultural values associated with the shift from industrial to “postindustrial” society see Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 87–​132. The classic work is Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 12. Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, “The Politics of Social Status: Economic and Cultural Roots of the Populist Right,” British Journal of Sociology 68, no. 51 (Nov. 2017). 13. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the American Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989). 14. Inglehart and Norris, “Rise of Populism”; Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, “Populism as a Problem of Social Integration,” Comparative Political Studies 53, no. 7 (2019): 1027–​1059, doi:10.1177/​0010414019879947; and Gidron and Hall, “Social Status”; Diana C. Mutz, “Status Threat, Not Economic Hardship, Explains the 2016 Presidential Vote,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 19 (2018): E4330–​E4339, doi:10.1073/​pnas.1718155115. 15. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 16. Thus, we participate in the political turn in the study of populism. See especially Carlos de la Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), xiii, 199, 201, and elsewhere. Robert Jansen reconstructs the epochs and different paradigms dominating populism studies, also opting for a political focus. See Robert S. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization: A New Theoretical Approach to Populism,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 163ff. 17. The latter is the stress of de la Torre, Populist Seduction, but the broader understanding helps in showing the increasingly universal presence if not success of populisms. 18. De la Torre, Populist Seduction, discussing the precariat comprised of workers in the informal sector. 19. See Sheri Berman, “Populism and the Embrace of Complexity,” Social Europe, 2019, https://​www.socialeurope.eu/​populism-​and-​complexity; Rodrik, “Driving Populism.” See Gidron and Hall, “Social Integration”; Gidron and Hall, “Social Status.”

228 Notes 20. Kenneth M. Roberts, “Populism, Political Mobilization, And Crises of Political Representation,” in The Promise And Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015); Béla Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest And Patience (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998); see also: Dani Rodrik, “What’s Been Stopping The Left?,” Social Europe, 2018, https://​www.socialeurope.eu/​whats-​been-​stopping-​the-​left. 21. For this concept see Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser, “Explaining the Emergence of Populism in Europe and the Americas,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 196; Berman, “Embrace of Complexity”; and Rodrik, “Driving Populism.” We note that these interpreters have different meanings of “supply” in mind. We tend to combine many of these, somewhat endangering the line between supply and demand. 22. While some populists, especially on the left, may propose specific solutions (usually demagogic, particularistic, and clientelist) to problems of welfare, more generally their programmatic appeal is vague and undeveloped, ultimately reduced to something like trust me, “I am your voice.” Because “Ya yo no soy yo, yo soy un pueblo”: “Trump: ‘I Am Your Voice,’ ” YouTube, 2016, https://​www.youtube.com/​ watch?v = ehvUQrRDyyU; “Ya Yo No Soy Yo, Yo Soy Un Pueblo: Chávez,” YouTube, 2012, https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v = DmIwRGInWDc. 23. Edmund Sears Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: Norton, 1989). 24. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 19. 25. Ibid., 227. 26. Morgan, Inventing People; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, 48–​53. 27. Charles H. MacIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940); Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Reinhart Koselleck, Otto Brunner, and Werner Conze, “Verfassung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon Zur Politisch-​Sozialen Sprache In Deutschland (Stuttgart: Klett-​Cotta Verlag, 1990), 863–​899. 28. For a clear and sharp statement of this see Jeremy Waldron, “Constitutionalism: A Skeptical View,” Public Law Research Paper, NYU School Of Law, no. 10–​87 (2012): 1–​ 46, who manages, in spite of his skepticism to partially reduce the conflict by proposing the idea of constitutional empowerment as a component of a “democratic” constitutionalism, that is not the same as the “popular constitutionalism,” a term that Waldron mentions but does not defend. See also Stephen Holmes, “Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy,” in Precommitment and the Paradox of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 195–​240. 29. We do not however agree with Mény and Surel that the conflict is between constitutionalism and populism. We see populism as enabled by the conflict to which it almost always proposes a solution, one that is logically authoritarian, thus neither democratic nor constitutionalist. See Yves Mény and Yves Surel, Par Le Peuple, Pour Le Peuple (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 38ff.

Notes  229 30. Anton Pelinka thus rightly sees the historical roots of populism in this original tension. See Anton Pelinka, “Right-​Wing Populism: Concept and Typology,” in Right-​ Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 3–​23. For another version of this argument, see Mukand and Rodrik, “Political Economy.” 31. Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). There are of course other notions of representation that she discusses, but as Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge University Press, 1997) has noted, the principle of election was always dominant both in the democratic revolutions, and under representative governments. As already noted for populism, even those who rely on what she called symbolic representation, have, with a few exceptions, had to have recourse to elections or at least referenda and plebiscites. 32. Emmanuel J. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? (New York: Praeger, [1789] 1964); Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1928). For the UK, Albert V. Dicey, The Law of Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1885, 1915] 2013). 33. Manin, The Principles of Representative Government. 34. “Convention government” in French terminology. 35. Morgan, Inventing People. 36. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Pluto Press, 1950). 37. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 239–​272; Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 38. Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); on the topic see also Cohen and Arato, Civil Society. 39. See Dicey, Law of Constitution, on the tension between the two types of sovereignty claims. 40. Morgan, Inventing People, makes exactly this point. 41. To Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy, populism is the radicalization of counter-​ democracy, beyond the democratic threshold itself. We prefer to consider it as the authoritarian pseudo-​democratic alternative. The difficulty is that some (perhaps most) movements have both a democratic and populist dimension. 42. Roberts, “Political Mobilization.” See also c­ hapter 2. 43. De la Torre, Populist Seduction, 119, 122ff; 198, has effectively polemicized against using crises as the origins of populisms that he sees as normal rather than extraordinary or temporary phenomena in Latin America. Elsewhere he himself re-​introduced crises, as possible if not fully necessary, to explain not just the presence but the success of populism. Recently he became more comfortable with the representation crisis explanation. See de la Torre, Promise and Perils, 19. Yet following him, we are cautious about requiring crisis for a general explanation, especially since, as Moffit has shown, populists themselves perform, and even create crises. Thus, we speak of crises and long-​term deficits depending on context. Benjamin Moffitt, The Global

230 Notes Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2016). 44. de la Torre, Populist Seduction, ibid.; Moffit, Rise of Populism. 45. Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, 32–​49, 453–​461. They focus not on status but on cultural backlash and the embrace of authoritarian values and right-​wing populism as a counter to post–​material values associated with cultural change initiated in the 1960s linked to the emergence of postindustrial society. While we think there is much to the cultural backlash thesis it is too one sided. We focus on status decline, solidarity, and economic-​welfare deficits as crucial parts of the explanation for the contemporary rise of populism. 46. Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, 453–​461. See the discussion in Jean L. Cohen, “Populism and the Politics of Resentment,” Jus Cogens 1 (2019): 5–​39, doi:10.2139/​ ssrn.3243548. 47. Gidron and Hall, “Social Status”; Mutz, “Status Threat.” 48. Gidron and Hall, “Social Status,” 9–​15; Norris and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash, 453–​461. 49. Arlie Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning of the American Right (New York: The New Press, 2016), 107. See also Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in the Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 50. Service workers (a category including many jobs performed by women) have low economic capital but high social capital and high emerging cultural capital. 51. Mutz, “Status Threat,” 4. 52. On the role of group status in the formation of political preferences see ibid., 36. 53. Such is the welcome perspective of Dani Rodrik, “In Defence of Economic Populism,” Social Europe, 2018, https://​www.socialeurope.eu/​defense-​economic-​populism; and Rodrik, “Driving Populism.” Given his strong critique of political populism, and his admission that economic populism also involves unrestrained government, we do not agree with his support of the latter even in extraordinary times. 54. See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011). 55. Greskovits, Protest and Patience. 56. Guillermo A. O’Donell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (1994): 55–​69, doi:10.1353/​jod.1994.0010. 57. Moffitt, Rise of Populism. 58. For a more detailed presentation, taking into account the transformation of party systems both as a cause and result of the emergence of populist party movements see ­chapters 2 and 3. 59. Kenneth M. Roberts, “Populism, Political Mobilization, and Crises of Political Representation,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 147–​150. 60. Germani, National Populism, 96, 97ff. 61. Roberts, “Political Mobilizations,” 148.

Notes  231 62. It is important however not to see this version as necessarily a second stage. In Peru, before the emergence of the classical incorporation populism in its main countries, the 1931 elections involved a bitter competition of two populist leaderships. 63. Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “The Cartel Party Thesis: A Restatement,” Perspectives on Politics 7, no. 4 (2009): 753–​766, doi:10.1017/​s1537592709991782. 64. De La Torre, Populist Seduction. 65. See Greskovits, Protest and Patience. We see economic populism as the adaptation of Keynesian interventionist redistributive social welfare–​oriented policies at lower levels of economic development than under European social democracy. As against the latter characterized by high levels of trade openness (see Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2011]), economic populism was linked to statist import substitution. According to Dani Rodrik, “Is Populism Necessarily Bad Economics?,” AEA Papers and Proceedings 108 (2018): 196–​199, doi:10.1257/​pandp.20181122, such policies initially led to rapid development of capacity and productivity. 66. This has been most strongly argued by de la Torre, Populist Seduction, 122–​123. He may go too far in downplaying the role of ISI or economic populism for classical populisms, not as a cause necessarily but as the preferred policy and program. 67. Greskovits, Protest and Patience, 101; Rodrik. “Economic Populism.” 68. On the Bucaram episode see de la Torre, Populist Seduction, 81; 99; Kaltwasser, “Emergence of Populism,” 202. 69. See de la Torre, Populist Seduction. On Peru, see Cameron Maxwell, “Peru: The Left Turn That Wasn’t,” in The Resurgence of The Latin American Left (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2011), 375–​398. 70. Rodrik, we think rightly, insists on the dominant role of hyper-​globalization and especially capital mobility in financial globalization to which reforming elites are forced to role adapt through neo-​liberal policies. See Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” Journal of International Business Policy (2018): doi:10.2139/​ssrn.2992819. 71. Robert Kaufmann, “The Political Left, the Export Boom, and the Populist Temptation,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 2011), 93–​116. 72. See Greskovits, Protest and Patience; Hilary Appel and Mitchell Alexander Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis. Neoliberal Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 73. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization”; according to Jansen, the rhetoric can exist without automatically leading to mobilization, for him the second half of the phenomenon. 74. See c­ hapter 5. 75. O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy.” 76. Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (1990): 51–​69. Juan Linz, “Presidential or Parliamentary Democracy: Does It Make a Difference?” in The Failure of Presidential Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). The thesis was anticipated by both Marx and Tocqueville as Linz repeatedly noted.

232 Notes

77. O’Donell, “Delegative Democracy,” 59–​61. 78. Ibid., 61. 79. Ibid., 62. 80. De la Torre, Populist Seduction, 71–​72. 81. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975). 82. This is the tradition that is revived by Rodrik, in spite of his very different economics than Marxism. See Rodrik, “Populism and Economics.” While he considers the roots of all populism to be economic, the reasons according to him for the differentiation of populisms can be seen as cultural. 83. Roberts, “Populist Structuring,” 150. 84. That this form of analysis is derived from classical economics is not contradicted by the fact that an economist like Rodrik understands “demand” in the form of grievances (with ultimately economic causes) and “supply” as narratives provided by actors. Rodrik, Globalization Paradox, 13–​15. 85. For a theory of causation, we will deal with the first in this chapter and leave the second, mobilization, to the interpretive sociological approach of c­ hapter 2. 86. As in Habermas, Communicative Action. 87. This is one, but only one, reason why supply and demand type explanation cannot stand alone, or treated as entirely separate, as by Brigitte Beauzamy, “Explaining the Rise of the Front National to Electoral Prominence: Multi-​ Faceted or Contradictory Models?,” in Right-​Wing Populism in Europe—​Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 177–​190. Even in economics there are more possibilities than merely supply-​demand models, and in our view, contrary to hers, these must be combined with more historical and sociological types of explanation. Carlos Ruzza is right in considering cultural and economic demand, and political demand paradigms to be compatible and complementary. See Carlos Ruzza, “Populism, Migration, and Xenophobia in Europe,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 206–​207. 88. For example de la Torre, Populist Seduction. 89. Kaltwasser, “Explaining the Emergence of Populism in Europe and the Americas,” in de La Torre, Promise and Perils, 196. 90. We will deal with the very strong logic of party formation in the case of populist movements in c­ hapter 2. 91. Roberts, “Political Mobilization”; “Populist Structuring”; Magnus E. Marsdal, “Loud Values, Muffled Interests: Third Way Social Democracy and Right-​Wing Populism,” in Right-​Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 23–​39. 92. Germani, National Populism. 93. Benjamin Arditti, “Insurgencies Don’t Have a Plan—​They Are the Plan: Political Performatives and Vanishing Mediators,” in The Promise and Perils Of Populism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 130, 132. 94. It has been shown however that locally based organization, and rational action on behalf of interests, has been present for this increasingly large social stratum. De la Torre, Populist Seduction. Citing Javier Auyero, “Patients of the State: An

Notes  233 Ethnographic Account of Poor People’s Waiting,” Latin American Research Review 46, no. 1 (2011): 5–​29, doi:10.1353/​lar.2011.0014. 95. De la Torre, Populist Seduction. 96. See Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 97. Interestingly, O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy,” has made bait and switch almost definitional of delegative democracy, given that the executive is not bound by institutions to adhere to campaign promises. Rodrik on the other hand links the type of action to the “inherent tendencies” of welfare state type “compensations” that are easily promised but too difficult to carry out in the context of hyper or financial globalization. See Rodrik, “Populism and Economics,” 6–​7. Accordingly, welfare state compensations were possible to institutionalize only in the Bretton Woods period of globalization, even if later compromised. 98. Roberts, “Political Mobilization,” 152; Roberts, “Populist Structuring”; Rodrik, “Stopping the Left.” 99. Catherine M. Conaghan, Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). 100. Marsdal, “Loud Values, Muffled Interests.” 101. Rodrik, Globalization Paradox; Rodrik’s theory and his idea of the viability in extraordinary moments of economic populism are inconsistent, leaving aside the political consequences that are a problem even where economic populism works in the short term. Interpreting the New Deal or North European Social Democracy as examples of populist economics is misleading. See Rodrik, “Is Populism Necessarily Bad.” 102. Rodrik, “Populism and Economics.” 103. Roberts, “Political Mobilization.” 104. Kaufmann, “Populist Temptation.” 105. Roberts, “Populist Structuring”; Marsdal, “Loud Values, Muffled Interests”; Mukand and Rodrik, “Political Economy,” conceptualize the two axes, one economy based, the other having to do with cultural identity, to be a function of two oppositions: the rich vs. the non-​rich and the majority vs. the minority. Rodrik applies this to the two versions of populism, left and right. See Dani Rodrik, “The Double Threat to Liberal Democracy,” Social Europe, 2018, https://​www.socialeurope.eu/​ double-​threat-​liberal-​democracy. The critique simultaneously of populist democracy and liberal technocracy is well taken, even if we do not accept the idea of “illiberal democracy.” 106. Cultural and economic as indicated by Marsdal, “Loud Values, Muffled Interests,” 49–​53; and somewhat less clearly by Roberts “Populist Structuring,” 151–​154. We believe that more or less the same position on the third axis, the political one, with the common critique of liberal democracy based on immediate or embodied popular sovereignty, is shared by all populisms. Here is the foundation of the thin ideology in the depiction of Mudde or Kaltwasser, as Roberts indicates. It may be possible however to see some populists located only on this axis, as he does in the case of the Italian Five Star Movement. See Roberts, “Populist Structuring,” 157. In

234 Notes general, however a host ideology is relied on, based on locations on the economic and/​or cultural axes. 107. On the FN see Beauzamy, “Electoral Prominence.” 108. Marsdal, “Loud Values, Muffled Interests.” 109. Roberts, “Populist Structuring,” 150–​157. Roberts sees the shift in terms of turning to the political axis, that involves a politization of the cultural dimension, concerning the interpretation of consensual values. We think it is clearer to describe the shift as from the economic to the cultural, but it is certainly not wrong to speak of shifting from the politization of economy to that of culture. Also, on the cultural axis even in his own depiction, it is a conflict between opposed values (liberal-​multicultural-​ universalist vs. traditional-​communitarian-​nationalist) rather than the same value that exists only on the political axis, namely popular sovereignty. 110. Marsdal, “Loud Values, Muffled Interests.” 111. Ibid., 11. 112. The argument has been made most systematically and convincingly by Thomas Piketty, “Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right: Rising Inequality and the Changing Structure of Political Conflict,” WID. World Working Paper Series, no. 7 (2018). 113. Rodrik, “Populism and Economics,” 13. 114. José P. Zúquete, “‘Free the People’: The Search for ‘True Democracy,’” in Western Europe’s Far-​Right Political Culture (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 115. Michal Krzyzanowski, “From Anti-​Immigration and Nationalist Revisionism to Islamophobia: Continuities and Shifts in Recent Discourses and Patterns of Political Communication of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ),” in Right-​Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 135–​148; and Beauzamy, “Electoral Prominence.” 116. See Krzyzanowski, “Nationalist Revisionism,” 135–​148; and Beauzamy, “Electoral Prominence”; and Merijn Oudenampsen, “Explaining the Swing to the Right: The Dutch Debate on the Rise of Right-​Wing Populism,” in Right-​Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 191–​208. 117. Ruzza, “Xenophobia in Europe”; Carlos Ruzza and Laura Balbo, “Italian Populism and the Trajectories of Two Leaders: Silvio Berlusconi and Umberto Bossi,” in Right-​ Wing Populism in Europe Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 163–​176. 118. See de la Torre’s critique in Populist Seduction. 119. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, chap. 9 on social movements. 120. Zúquete, “Free the People,” 232–​233. 121. For our summary see Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, chap. 9. 122. Cohen, “Politics of Resentment.” See also Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016). 123. On “affective polarization” see ­chapter 2. 124. Cited by Thomas B. Edsall, “The Resentment that Never Sleeps,” Nytimes.Com, 2020, https://​www.nytimes.com/​2020/​12/​09/​opinion/​trump-​social-​status-​ resentment.html. 125. De la Torre, Promise and Perils.

Notes  235 126. Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 121–​153. 127. Ibid., 201–​205, for returns to an earlier paradigm of the politically committed press, where newspapers were often owned by parties. 128. Ibid., 126. 129. Silvio Waisbord, “Populism as Media and Communication Phenomenon,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge Publishing, 2019); and Benjamin Moffitt, “Populism and Media in Western Europe,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge Publishing, 2019). 130. Moffit, Rise of Populism. 131. For the contrary argument, see Waisbord, “Populism as Media.” 132. Still the best Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-​Brunswik, and Daniel J. Levinson, The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso, 2019); Theodor W. Adorno, The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000). 133. Moffit, “Populism and Media,” 243ff. 134. The two cases most often mentioned here are Podemos and the Five Star Movement. 135. For the larger process involved see Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997); Habermas, Structural Transformation. Waisbord, “Populism as Media and Communication Phenomenon,” in Carlos de la Torre, Routledge Handbook of Global Populism, 221–​234. 136. See Manin, Representative Government, on audience democracy, 226. 137. Moffit, Populism and the Media, 242ff. 138. N. Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

Chapter 2 1. On the movementization of parties see Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos, Deeply Divided: Racial Politics and Social Movements in Post-​ War America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and David S. Meyer and Sydney Tarrow, The Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 1–​21. 2. For an overview of the relationship between movement and party literature see Donatella della Porta et al., Movement Parties against Austerity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), 1–​28. See also Doug McAdam and Sidney Tarrow, “Ballots and Barricades: On the Reciprocal Relationship between Elections and Social Movements,” Perspectives On Politics 8, no. 2 (2010): 529–​542, doi:10.1017/​ s1537592710001234; and Meyer and Tarrow, The Resistance, 1–​21. 3. We will discuss other similarities and differences later in the chapter. But we want to be clear. We consider periodic movement challenges to the rigidity, exclusions, and unrepresentative, unresponsive, unaccountable character of an existing party system or set of democratic institutions to be inherent in representative democracy, because democracy is always a “verité a faire”—​an unfinished project. As

236 Notes such, democracy is a “telic” concept that invites social movements, and contentious collective action, to emerge and aim at the better realization of its normative ideals of inclusiveness, equality, freedom, voice, social justice, and social solidarity along with fair electoral procedures. For the telic concept of democracy see Charles Taylor, “Walter-​Benjamin-​Lectures,” lecture, Humanities and Social Change Center at Humboldt University, 2019. 4. But counter-​movements oriented toward protecting entrenched privilege, often triggered by widespread progressive and populist mobilizations, can have the opposite impact if they succeed. 5. While some new social movements also faced the question of whether to participate in party political competition, for them it was a real choice. This is clarified in the next section. 6. Robert Dahl, Pluralist Democracy in the United States: Conflict and Consent (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), 429–​30. See the discussion in Daniel Schlozman, When Movements Anchor Parties: Electoral Alignments in American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 16–​18. 7. Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 16–​18. 8. Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013), 95–​96. See the section on Political Parties and Their Transformation in this chapter. 9. Charles Tilly, “Models and Realities of Popular Collective Action,” Social Research 52, no. 4 (1985): 717–​747. And Claus Offe, “New Social Movements: Challenging the Boundaries of Institutional Politics,” Social Research 52, no. 4 (1985): 817–​868. 10. Ibid., 826–​827. 11. “New Social Movements” referred to feminist, civil rights, ecology and peace movements from the early 1960s to the late 1970s. See the issue of Social Research, 52, no. 4 (1985). 12. Jean L. Cohen, “Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements,” Social Research 52, no. 4 (1985): 663–​716; and better, Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), chap. 10. 13. Tilly, “Models and Realities,” 682. 14. Cohen, “Strategy or Identity,” 663–​716. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society. 15. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, 531–​534. 16. Such claims however may emerge within new social movements, representing the views of “fundamentalists.” Such views have an elective affinity with populism and can become integrated within populist party movements. 17. Offe, “New Social Movements,” 829. 18. Ibid., 830. 19. Ibid. 20. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, “The German Green Party: A Movement between Fundamentalism and Modernity,” Dissent 31, no. 3 (1984): 327–​332. 21. Offe, “New Social Movements,” 830–​831.

Notes  237 22. For an early critique of mass movements see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York; London: Harcourt Brace, 1951). 23. Cohen, “Strategy Or Identity,” 663–​716; and Offe, “New Social Movements,” 817–​868. 24. Offe, “New Social Movements,” 840. See also Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 250–​ 267, critiquing the “pan movements” and movement parties. While her mass society thesis has been disproved regarding the atomist unorganized bases for participants on fascist movements, her analysis of their logic, if not generalized to all movements still has much truth to it. For an outstanding exception to this approach that construes mass movements as integral to democracy while cogently analyzing the logic and nature of regressive mass movements and their links to Caesarism, see Franz Neumann, “Anxiety in Politics,” in The Democratic and Authoritarian State (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1957), 170–​300. 25. Cohen, “Strategy or Identity,” 663–​716. 26. Dahl, Pluralist Democracy, 429–​30. 27. Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 16. 28. McAdam and Tarrow, “Ballots and Barricades,” 533–​534. 29. Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 23. 30. See their articles in Social Research 52, no. 4 (1985). See also Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, “Making Sense of our Hollow Parties,” presentation, State of the Parties: 2016 and Beyond Conference, 2017. 31. Herbert Kitschelt, “Movement Parties,” in Handbook of Party Politics (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 278–​290. 32. Doug McAdam, “Putting Donald Trump in Historical Perspective,” in The Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 27–​53. See also McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided, 10. They argue that parties tend to play to the base when challenged by sustained national movements attuned to electoral politics, instead of courting the median voter. 33. I am referring to the infamous Southern strategy embracing racist appeals to whites in the South devised by George Wallace, governor of Alabama, and Richard Nixon in 1964, 1968, and 1972, respectively in response to President Lyndon Johnson’s and the Democratic Party’s embrace of the civil rights movement and secularism. See McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 32–​41. 34. McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 32–​41. See also Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Ian Shapiro, Responsible Parties: Saving Democracy From Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 35. McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 42. 36. All the same, we do not endorse the highly negative assessment of the primary system in vogue among some political scientists today, nor the implicit anti-​movement bias, especially insofar as it seems to idealize the exclusionary elitism that preceded it. 37. McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 27–​53; Kenneth Roberts, “Populism, Democracy, and Resistance,” in The Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 63–​64; and Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties, 1–​25. 38. Elmer Eric Schattschneider, Party Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1942).

238 Notes 39. Ibid., passim. 40. See Mair, Ruling the Void, on the hollowing out of parties in Europe; Schlozman and Rosenfeld, “Making Sense of Our Hollow Parties,” 2017; and Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld, “The Hollow Parties,” in Can America Govern Itself? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 120–​152. 41. We borrow the term movementization from Meyer and Tarrow, The Resistance, 6. See also McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided. 42. Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 16; and Nadia Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 159–​ 176. Populist anti-​party parties prefer partisans without parties, rhetorically at least. 43. See Max Weber’s classificatory scheme in Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 102–​111. For an updated classification of party types see Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, Democracy and the Cartelization of Political Parties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 44. The classic portrayal of the mass party remains that of Maurice Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1963). See also Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 22; Mair, Ruling the Void, 77. This development and trajectory is typical of Western Europe. 45. See Katz and Mair, Cartelization for these terms and for the argument that the mass party involved strong linkages between the party on the ground, its ancillary organizations and the party in central office. 46. Duverger, Political Parties. 47. See Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 37–​40. 48. Hans Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, [1929] 2013) who argues (87–​97) that democracy must entail party government in parliament. For a discussion of the shift in the United States to the positive assessment of the role of parties in democracy see Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–​1840 (Berkeley: University of California, 1969). 49. Mair, Ruling the Void, 78. Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 1–​64 argue that the mass parties did not simply reflect but fostered these cleavage structures when they worked to their advantage. Cited in Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 39. 50. Mair, Ruling the Void, 80. See also the discussion Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 40–​45. 51. Ibid., 126. 52. Ibid., 90–​97. 53. Susan E. Scarrow, “Parties without Members?,” in Parties without Partisans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79–​101. 54. See the chart and discussion listing the few European countries with parties with membership-​based organizations in Scarrow, “Parties without Members,” 92–​94. 55. See Moīseĭ Íakolevīch Ostrogorskiĭ, Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties (New York: Macmillan, 1902). See his analysis and denunciation of the

Notes  239 machine and caucus-​based versions of US political parties. For an analysis of the plebiscitarian tendencies of the machine based US party especially in the context of the presidential system, see Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 102–​111. Indeed, one could argue that in the United States the catch-​all party form was the paradigmatic party type from early on. 56. Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” 94. 57. Otto Kirchheimer, “The Transformation of the Western European Party System,” in Politics, Law, and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 346–​371. 58. Ibid., 346–​371. 59. At the time, the normative cachet of multi-​partyism was very high, in part because it was widely associated with the return to, maintenance, or conquest of democracy after WWII and as the only alternative to autocratic one-​party rule. Piero Ignazi, “Parties’ Legitimacy At Stake,” presentation, “The Status of Political Parties in Liberal Democracies” Conference, 2019. 60. Kirchheimer, “Transformation,” 346–​371. See also Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 9–​47; Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 10–​16. 61. Kirchheimer, “Transformation,” 346–​371. See also Katz and Mair, Cartelization. 62. Ibid., 51. 63. Kirchheimer, “Transformation,” 346–​371. 64. Ibid. See the discussion in Susan E. Scarrow, Paul E. Webb, and David M. Farrell, “From Social Integration to Electoral Contestation,” in Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 129. 65. Katz and Mair, Cartelization, Figure 6.3, “Parties, Civil Society and the State: The Catch-​All Party Type,” 127. 66. Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy,” Party Politics 1, no. 1 (1995): 5–​28, doi:10.1177/​1354068895001001001. 67. But see Kirchheimer already on the waning of the opposition regarding the catch all party. Otto Kirchheimer, “The Waning of Opposition in Parliamentary Regimes,” in Politics, Law, and Social Change: Selected Essays of Otto Kirchheimer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 292–​318. 68. Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 51. 69. Mair, Ruling the Void, 82–​83. 70. Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 52. 71. Ibid. 72. Kirchheimer anticipated elements of the cartel party thesis, noting the close relationship between catch-​all party and state in the post-​war welfare state constellation. He observed the shift from parties as purely private organizations governed by their own rules and procedures and funded by their own resources into organizations that were increasingly regulated by the state and ever more dependent on its resources. He anticipated that electorally driven parties would pursue the median voter leading to policy convergence along with a focus on candidate personality, short-​term issues, and managerial competence. But he focused on transformations within society as the

240 Notes driver of party change while Katz and Mair stress internal party system developments and state decisions embodied in law. See Kirchheimer, “Waning of Opposition.” See also the discussion in Scarrow, Webb, and Farrell, “Social Integration,” 129. See Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 193–​235, for another discussion of the transformation of party systems and for the concept of audience democracy that has nothing to do with the idea of a cartel. 73. Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 13. 74. Ibid., 127, Figure 6.4, “Parties, Civil Society and the State: The Cartel Party Type,” 141, Table 6.3, “Characteristics of Party Ideal Types.” 75. Schlozman and Rosenfeld, “Making Sense.” 76. Mair, Ruling the Void, 83–​89. Such developments allegedly imperil the autonomy of the entire party system, a crucial feature of democratic party systems as Sartori rightly argued. Sartori, Parties, 57. 77. Vanessa Williamson and Theda Skocpol, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jane Mayer, Dark Money (New York: Doubleday, 2016). On democratic party funding see Schlozman and Rosenfeld, “Making Sense.” 78. Schlozman and Rosenfeld, “Making Sense.” See also Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 3–​18, 261–​285. 79. Katz and Mair, Cartelization. Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties. And Scarrow, “Parties without Members,” 79–​101. 80. Katz and Mair, Cartelization, 65–​68. 81. Ibid., 183–​4; Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 12–​13. 82. Ruud Koole, “Cadre, Catch-​All or Cartel?,” Party Politics 2, no. 4 (1996): 507–​523, doi:10.1177/​ 1354068896002004004; and Herbert Kitschelt, “Citizens, Politicians and Party Cartelization: Political Representation and State Failure in Post Industrial Societies,” European Journal of Political Research 37, no. 2 (2000): 149–​ 179, doi:10.1111/​1475-​6765.00508; Yael Yishai, “Bringing Society Back In,” Party Politics 7, no. 6 (2001): 667–​687, doi:10.1177/​1354068801007006001. 83. Kitschelt, “Party Cartelization,” 166–​176. 84. Ibid., 175. 85. Ibid., 168. 86. Ibid., 160–​163. 87. Paraphrasing Kitschelt, ibid., 162–​169. He cites long periods of electoral hegemony of a cross class compromise by parties in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, where it is because of their focus on electoral accountability and centripetal competition between center right and moderate social democratic parties that it was hard to choose unpopular economic programs. They were representative of preferences for protecting existing welfare states, but disaffection with the political establishment skyrocketed because of structural unemployment. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 172–​3. 90. Ibid., 171–​174.

Notes  241 91. We borrow the term movementization from Meyer and Tarrow, The Resistance, 6. See also McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided. 92. Cohen, “Strategy or Identity,” 664–​715. See also Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, chap. 7. 93. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw Hill, 1978), 69. Unfortunately Tilly, too, is somewhat economistic referring to coercive, utilitarian, and normative “resources,” “with well-​established market values” required to be mobilized. 94. See Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, for the atomized mass society thesis as the ground for fascist mobilization. See also William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York/​London: Routledge, 1959). 95. Robert S. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization; A New Theoretical Approach to Populism,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 168–​169. 96. Ibid. 97. Vladimir Lenin, What Is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz, 1902); Rosa Luxemburg, Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy [Leninism or Marxism?] (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz, 1904). 98. Kenneth M. Roberts, “Populism, Political Mobilization, and Crises of Political Representation,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 142–​143. We look at empirical cases later. 99. See ibid., 144, on Peron, Fujimori, and Chavez. See, on Venezuela, Margarita López Maya, “Popular Power in the Discourse of Hugo Chavez’s Government (1999–​2013),” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 372–​397. 100. See Raúl L. Madrid, “The Emergence of Ethno-​Populism in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 163–​ 164, 165ff. See also Nancy Postero, “El Pueblo Boliviano, De Composición Plural”: A Look at Plurinationalism in Bolivia,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), 398–​430. 101. That is the inclination of Steven Levitsky and Kenneth M. Roberts, The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 12–​16, where they distinguish the populist left as in Venezuela and Ecuador from the movement left as in Bolivia. In the end they however do speak of moving “in a populist direction” in Bolivia too (page 16). Roberts in a later essay distinguishes between two positions he had taken on this issue, first excluding then including movements “from below” under the rubric populism. See Roberts, “Political Mobilization,” 145. 102. Carlos Ruzza, “Populism, Migration, and Xenophobia In Europe,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 201–​216. 103. López Maya, “Discourse of Chavez,” 380. 104. András Kovacs, “The Post-​Communist Extreme Right: The Jobbik Party in Hungary,” in Right-​Wing Populism in Europe—​Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 224.

242 Notes 105. The EDL was denounced initially as a Zionist plot by members of the BNP, before more co-​operative relations and overlaps developed. See John E. Richardson, “Ploughing the Same Furrow? Continuity and Change on Britain’s Extreme-​ Right Fringe,” in Right-​ Wing Populism in Europe—​ Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), 105–​120. 106. See a detailed analysis in Ruzza, “Xenophobia in Europe.” 107. See Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making; and the Adventures of the Constituent Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 4; Béla Greskovits, “Rebuilding the Hungarian Right through Civil Organization and Contention: The Civic Circles Movement,” EUI Working Papers—​RSCAS 2017/​37, Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, 2017. 108. See Andrew Arato, Civil Society, Constitution and Legitimacy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), chap. 2; also David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 109. Béla Greskovits, “Rebuilding the Hungarian Right through Civil Organization and Contention: The Civic Circles Movement,” East European Politics 36, no. 2 (2017): 247–​266, doi:10.2139/​ssrn.3009623. 110. The Hungarian term “polgári” has the ambiguities of the German bürgerlich. Derived from Istvan Bibó’s Tocquevillian small circles of freedom and oddly echoing the name of the Bolivarian Circles of Chavez established a year earlier. In his thesis, Orbán alternated between the traditional Hungarian term “polgári” and the neo-​logistic term “civil,” whereas in 2002 only the term “polgári” was used with its “bourgeois” connotations, first for the Circles and later for the renamed party. This was probably to emphasize the desire to build a lower-​middle-​class movement. For his thesis, see: HVG Zrt., “Itt Még Elolvashatja Orbán Viktor Szakdolgozatát A Civilekről,” Hvg.Hu, 2020, https://​hvg.hu/​itthon/​20170111_​orban_​viktor_​ szakdolgozat_​civilek_​a_​lengyel_​pelda_​miniszterelnok_​hu. 111. See Kovacs, “Post-​Communist Extreme Right.” 112. See c­ hapter 4 in this text, on populism and constitutionalism. 113. See Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 1–​46, on these dynamics of movement and party alliance. 114. Jansen, “Populist Mobilization”: populist rhetoric plus popular mobilization. 115. López Maya, “Discourse of Chavez,” 380–​ 383; also, Margarita López Maya, “Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Populist Left,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 213–​239. 116. López Maya argues this result was the input of many groups associated with but independent of the “party” of Chavez, the MVR (Fifth Republic Movement), the primarily electoral successor of the MBR200. It was left-​wing splinters from the CPV (Communist Party of Venezuela) that influenced the elements of participation and decentralization. 117. Interpreters point to grassroots direct democrats and even more to splits from the small Marxist Leninist CPV. Benjamin Goldfrank, “The Left and Participatory Democracy: Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2011), 177; López Maya “Discourse of Chavez,” 215–​216, 378–​9.

Notes  243 118. Goldfrank, “Participatory Democracy,” 162–​183. 119. Ibid., 178–​179; López Maya, “Venezuela,” 226; and López Maya, “Discourse of Chavez,” 380–​385. 120. López Maya, “Venezuela,” 217–​218. 121. Carlos De La Torre, “The Contested Meanings of Insurrections, the Sovereign People, and Democracy in Ecuador, Venezuela and Bolivia,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 122. Levitsky and Roberts, eds., The Resurgence of the Latin American Left; Raul L. Madrid, “The Rise of Ethno-​Populism in Latin America,” World Politics 60, no. 3 (April 2008): 475–​508, https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S0043887100009060; Kenneth M. Roberts, “Left, Right, and the Populist Structuring of Political Competition,” Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2018), 149–​162. Postero, “Pueblo Boliviano.” 123. Ibid., 399–​401. 124. Tsirpas became Greek Prime Minister but did not rise from a movement and the Syriza party in our view was not fully movementized. 125. Raúl Madrid, “Bolivia: Origins and Policies of the Movimiento Al Socialismo,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 239–​259; Postero, “Pueblo Boliviano,” 401–​402. 126. Ibid. 127. Madrid, “Movimiento,” 252–​253. See also c­ hapter 3 in this text. 128. Interpreting re-​eligibility of the president as a human right based on the OAS Treaty, despite constitutional and referendum decisions. Staff, “Bolivian Court Clears Way For Morales To Run For Fourth Term,” Reuters.com, 2017, https://​ www.reuters.com/a​ rticle/u ​ s-b ​ olivia-p ​ olitics/b ​ olivian-c​ ourt-c​ lears-w ​ ay-f​ or-m ​ orales​to-​run-​for-​fourth-​term-​idUSKBN1DS2ZX. 129. Madrid, “Movimiento.” 130. della Porta et al., Austerity, 1–​28. 131. Ibid., 70. 132. Ibid., 70–​83. 133. Ibid., 73. 134. Ibid., 76. 135. Ibid., 70–​74; while it is hard to say what Syriza’s trajectory would have been without European pressure, Tsirpas did embrace pragmatic responsible political compromise once in power. 136. On the emergence of the Indignados movement in 2011–​2012 and its role regarding Podemos’s hybrid organizational structure as a movement party see Daniela Chironi and Raffaella Fittipaldi, “Social Movements and New Forms of Political Organization: Podemos as a Hybrid Party,” The Open Journal of Socio-​Political Studies 10, no. 1 (2017). 137. Ibid.; della Porta et al., Austerity, 50. 138. Ibid., 45–​52. 139. Ibid., 50.

244 Notes 140. For an optimistic assessment of the hybrid nature of Podemos see Chironi, and Fittipaldi, “Political Organization.” 141. This section draws heavily from della Porta et al., Austerity, 52–​53, 78–​85. 142. Ibid., 81. 143. Ibid, 83. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid., 57–​65. 146. Filippo Tronconi, “The Italian Party System and the Anti-​Party Challenge,” in Anti-​ Party Parties in Germany and Italy (Rome: Luis University Press, 2015), 213–​234. 147. Paolo Gerbaudo, The Digital Party (London: Pluto Books, 2019). 148. Ibid., for a comparative discussion of populist digital platform parties in Italy (M5S) and Germany (the Piratenpartei). 149. della Porta et al., Austerity, 86. 150. Gerbaudo, Digital Party, 3–​5, 86–​88. 151. Other examples are the successes of pirate parties in Northern Europe: the first Pirate Party was founded in Sweden 2006, they began to crop up in Germany and Iceland and saw themselves also as digital democratic movements. Gerbaudo, Digital Party, 8–​9. 152. For an analysis of the M5S organizational structure see della Porta, Austerity, 86–​92. 153. Gerbaudo, Digital Party, 66–​70. 154. Ibid., 71. 155. Ibid., 75–​80, 90–​104, 144–​148. 156. Ibid., 9. The technical mastermind behind the scene in the M5S is Gianroberto Casaleggio, owner of the digital consulting firm Casaleggio Associati and co-​ founder of the movement. 157. Ibid., 71. 158. Ibid., 76, 127–​143. Clearly this follows on the path of plebiscitary transformation of cartel parties that had introduced primaries and direct leadership elections. 159. Ibid., 101–​104. 160. Alberto Melucci, “The Symbolic Challenge of Contemporary Movements,” Social Research 52, no. 4 (1985): 789–​816. 161. This does not mean that digital membership could not be combined with associational forms, but populist rhetoric of the M5S as a “non-​association” precludes this. Instead, it fosters the emergence of hyper leaders and plebiscitary relationships with followers. Gerbaudo, Digital Party, 144–​161. 162. Ibid., 77–​80. 163. For a comparative discussion of the German Pirate Party as another digital party and the M5S, see Marco Deseriis, “Digital Movement Parties: A Comparative Analysis of the Technopolitical Cultures and the Participation Platforms of the Movimento 5 Stelle and the Piratenpartei,” Information, Communication & Society, 2019, 1–​17, doi:10.1080/​1369118x.2019.1631375. 164. Jaime Bartlett, Joathan Birdwell, and Mark Littler, “The New Face of the Digital Populism,” Demos, 2012. 165. della Porta, Austerity, 97.

Notes  245 166. Gerbaudo, Digital Parties, 78—​80, 90–​91, 179–​189; and della Porta, Austerity, 172–​ 180, discussing movement parties in power. 167. Skocpol and Williams, The Tea Party. 168. Ibid. 169. Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 13, argues that the TP should be seen more as a party faction seeking control of the Republican Party than as a social movement with independent goals and supporters. 170. Skocpol and Williams, The Tea Party, 102–​110; and Schlozman, Movements, 11–​12. 171. Ibid., 98. 172. Ibid., 59–​61. 173. Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016), 13–​14. 174. Skocpol and Williams, The Tea Party, 102–​110. 175. Ibid, 56–​59. See also Jean L. Cohen, “Populism and the Politics Of Resentment,” Jus Cogens 1 (2019): 5–​39, doi:10.2139/​ssrn.3243548. 176. This is traceable back to Nixon and then Reagan’s infamous Southern strategy and Newt Gingrich’s obstructionist politics in successive Congresses. See James Boyd, “Nixon’s Southern Strategy: It’s All in the Charts,” Nytimes.Com, 1970, https://​ www.nytimes.com/​1970/​05/​17/​archives/​nixons-​southern-​strategy-​its-​all-​in-​the-​ charts.html; and Dan T. Carter, From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963–​1994, Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 35. 177. See Roberts, “Populist Structuring.” He thinks that Trump overcame these contradictions by insisting on a dimension shared by all these actors, namely anti-​ immigrant demagogy. 178. It goes too far, however, to claim that Trump appealed to a desire for enjoyment, or to populist jouissance. See Oliver Jutel, “Donald Trump, American Populism and Affective Media,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019). Yes, many enjoyed his political incorrectness and clowning, but this was hardly true of most of his voters. 179. For excellent monographs on this issue see: Cramer, Resentment; Justin Gest, The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know® (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land (New York: The New Press, 2016). See also Cohen, “Politics of Resentment.” 180. Kitschelt, “Movement Parties,” 278–​290. 181. Ibid., 280–​281. Movement parties are not new: fascist, national socialist, and communist parties were all (anti-​democratic) movement parties, but in power they ended the autonomy of the movements, of state institutions, and the rule of law. See Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). Our interest is in movement parties purporting to be democratic. 182. Ibid. 183. Kitschelt, “Movement Parties,” 281–​2. 184. Ibid., 290. 185. Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 3.

246 Notes 186. Ibid. 187. Ibid., 3, 43, 247. 188. We cannot go into the reasons why movement entrepreneurs choose to ally with a particular political party instead of attempting to influence both parties. See Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 14–​49. But it is obvious that given the case of the US political system, the chances of launching a successful movement party in the 20th and 21st centuries is small, while the catch-​all party format and its gradual hollowing out offer an opportunity for political entrepreneurs in major social movements to enter into one of the major parties to influence or capture it. Nor can I delve deeply here into the reasons why parties seek alliances with movements, although it is obvious that they do so when movements have access to resources (money, time, votes, networks, troops) that parties covet or need in order to win elections. 189. Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 198–​222, sees the rise of the white, evangelical, Christian right in the late 1970s as the anchoring movement within the Republican party. 190. McAdam and Kloos, Deeply Divided; McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 33. 191. Ibid., 42–​43. 192. Ibid., 43. 193. Schlozman and Rosenfeld, “Making Sense.” The Republican Party followed suit with its caucus system. 194. McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 42, argues that convergence and moderation on the part of parties appealing to the median voter prevails only during periods of social movement quiescence. 195. Ibid., 43–​45. See also Rosenbluth and Shapiro, Responsible Parties, 1, 6, 94, 102–​104, 109–​113 for a critique of the democratizing claims regarding primaries. 196. As Colin Crouch rightly notes, market and corporate neoliberalism are not identical: the former is ideologically opposed to state action in the market economy while the latter is quite happy to use the state for their own benefit and to block regulatory efforts aimed at limiting corporate monopolies. Colin Crouch, Post-​Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 106. 197. Meyer and Tarrow, The Resistance, 6–​7. See also Schlozman, Movements Anchor Parties, 253–​255; on the differences between the TP and the older Christian right movement regarding the Republican Party. The TP, he contends, began as an aggressive party faction rather than as a social movement grappling with limits of electoral politics. It chose the primary as weapon to dethrone RINOs (Republicans in name only). Thus, instead of brokered concessions to minority interests this resulted in something more akin to capture by tea partiers. This is even more true of Donald Trump. 198. Williamson and Skocpol, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservativism. 207–​215. They show throughout the book and in this conclusion how the TP forces in conjunction with the comprehensive political networks established and orchestrated by the Koch brothers were able to bypass, further hollow out, and substitute for the Republican Party structures in funding, candidate promotion,

Notes  247 and agenda setting and to push the party to the right. See also Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo, eds., Upending American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 199. See c­ hapter 5. 200. McAdam, “Donald Trump,” 46–​48. He mentions three institutional developments that predate the coming to power of populists: the primary and caucus system that fosters partisan polarization and amplifies the voice of the mobilized movement wings of the two parties marginalizing the median voter and thus eviscerating political equality, restrictive state voting laws, and extreme gerrymandering no longer blocked by the Supreme Court. 201. Roberts, “Populist Structuring.” 202. We follow Hawkins’s concise distinction between a political worldview, discourse, and ideology. See Kirk Andrew Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo and Populism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30–​31. Accordingly, a worldview as it pertains to the role of ideas in politics is a set of fundamental assumptions about how the political world works, including norms and a cosmology and ontology: a sense of how the universe operates and who the real actors in it are. A worldview describes a set of fundamental ideas in the abstract. “Discourse” refers to the language in which these ideas or beliefs are expressed in the distinct language that expresses or shapes some of our fundamental assumptions. “Ideology” refers to a coherent set of normative and causal arguments about the appropriate course of action for government or society consciously elaborated and providing a program or set of practical policies not merely a utopia. Here we draw on Hawkins’s approach relating the logic of populism to the underlying worldview in order to give a systematic analysis of the dynamics of populist parties in and out of power, although we stress slightly different elements than Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo, 29–​42. 203. Nancy L. Rosenblum, On the Side of the Angels (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 124–​125. Although such taming of conflict does not rule out polarization, deep commitment, or radical partisan positions regarding even constitutional change. 204. Ibid., 124. 205. Sartori, Parties, chap. 1; Rosenblum, Angels, 124; Jonathan White and Lea Ypi, The Meaning of Partisanship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 19–​36. 206. Rosenblum, Angels, 54–​56. On page 54, Rosenblum cites de Tocqueville on the moral importance of winning a procedural majority and thus gaining the authority to govern and represent the whole. But this should not be confused with holism, i.e., the rejection of political division and of party pluralism. 207. Ibid., 48–​56. 208. Ibid, 26–​48. 209. Sartori, Parties, 24–​28; Rosenblum, Angels, 50–​51. 210. Ibid., 52. 211. Ibid., 362. See also White and Ypi, The Meaning of Partisanship.

248 Notes 212. Sartori, Parties, 65. 213. Ibid., 59. 214. Ibid., 59, 65. And Rosenblum, Angels, 25–​59, discussing holism. 215. Madison, Federalist number 10 cited in Sartori, Parties, 11–​12. 216. Ibid., 25. 217. Rosenblum, Angels; Urbinati, Me the People; and especially David Ragazzoni, “The Populist Leader’s Two Bodies: Bobbio, Berlusconi, and the Factionalization of Party Democracy,” Constellations 27, no. 2 (2020): 213–​230, doi:10.1111/​1467-​ 8675.12495, 1–​18, citing important earlier work of Noberto Bobbio, “Sono Partiti O Sono Fazioni?,” La Stampa, 1979. 218. Ragazzoni, “Two Bodies,” 1–​18. 219. Ibid. 220. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). 221. Kelsen, Essence. On majoritarianism see the discussion of democracy in ­chapter 3. 222. Sartori, Parties, 66. 223. Ibid. 224. Ibid., 131. 225. Ibid., 132–​140. 226. Ibid., 135. The examples Sartori gives are post–​World War II Italy, France, and Weimar Germany in which a party or a group of parties occupies the metrical center of the system. 227. Sartori, Parties, 142, notes that social and political segmentation is not identical to polarized pluralism. Accordingly, consensus democracies of Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, etc. are segmented but not polarized. 228. Tronconi, “Italian Party System,” 213–​234. 229. Ibid. 230. Ibid. 231. Hawkins, Venezuela’s Chavismo, 175. Yet, Sartori never mentioned populism. 232. In France, the Macron presidency can be seen heading a hybrid technocratic, centrist yet mildly populist party, “La Republique en Marche” founded in 2016, flanked by Jean-​Luc Melanchon’s left-​wing populist party, “La France Insoumise” also founded in 2016, and Marine Le Pen’s right-​wing populist party, “La Rassemblement Nationale” founded in 2011. 233. I borrow the term “pernicious polarization” from Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies: Comparative Evidence and Possible Remedies,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 681, no. 1 (2018): 234–​271, doi:10.1177/​0002716218818782. While all polarizing politicians and parties are certainly not all populist, all populist parties and political entrepreneurs are polarizers. 234. Much of the literature on affective polarization emerged to address the transformation of US party politics. See Shanto Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1 (2019): 129–​146, doi:10.1146/​annurev-​polisci-​051117-​073034, for a summary of recent debates. See Jennifer McCoy, Tahmina Rahman, and Murat Somer,

Notes  249 “Polarization and the Global Crisis of Democracy: Common Patterns, Dynamics, and Pernicious Consequences for Democratic Polities,” American Behavioral Scientist 62, no. 1 (2018): 16–​42, doi:10.1177/​0002764218759576 for comparisons of affective polarization in populist Hungary, the United States, Venezuela, and Turkey. 235. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 20–​21. 236. Shanto Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States,” Annual Review of Political Science 22 (2019): 129–​146. And Shanto Iyengar, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes, “Affect Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization,” Political Science Quarterly, 2012, 1–​27. 237. Sartori, Parties, 173–​181. And McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 5. 238. Morris P. Fiorina and Samuel J. Abrams, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” Annual Review of Political Science 11, no. 1 (2008): 563–​588, doi:10.1146/​ annurev.polisci.11.053106.153836; Frances E. Lee, “How Party Polarization Affects Governance,” Annual Review of Political Science 18, no. 1 (2015): 261–​282, doi:10.1146/​annurev-​polisci-​072012-​113747. 239. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 22, 34–​35; and McCoy and Somer, “Pernicious Polarization,” 234–​271. 240. Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, “Transformations through Polarizations and Global Threats to Democracy,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 681, no. 1 (2018): 8–​22, doi:10.1177/​0002716218818058. See also Cramer, Resentment. 241. Christian Rostboll, “Two Kinds of Polarization,” Unpublished Manuscript, 2019. On hand with the authors. 242. On valence issues see Donald E. Stokes, “Spatial Models of Party Competition,” American Political Science Review 57, no. 2 (1963): 368–​377, doi:10.2307/​1952828. 243. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 16–​42; Cramer, Resentment. And Cohen, “Politics Of Resentment.” 244. Rostboll, “Two Kinds of Polarization,” 11. 245. Ibid., 16. 246. Ibid., 10. 247. Ibid. 248. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 22. 249. Those who focus on ideological distance as the core of polarization include Sartori, Parties; Nolan McCarthy, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, “Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches,” Working Paper No. 5, Center on Institutions and Governance, Institute of Governmental Studies University of California, Berkeley, February 2005; and Fiorina and Abrams, “American Public.” We agree with McCoy, Rahman, and Somer that the form of severe polarization fostered by populism need not, although it can, entail great ideological distance. McCoy and Somer, “Transformation Through Polarization,” 8–​22. 250. Laclau, Populist Reason. 251. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 26. See Laclau, Populist Reason, the best statement of the populist logic and worldview and Arato’s analysis of this in Andrew

250 Notes Arato, “Political Theology and Populism,” Social Research 80, no. 1 (2013): 143–​172. See also c­ hapter 1 of this book. 252. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 26–​36; analyzing Hungary under Orbán, Turkey under Erdogan, the United States under Trump, and Venezuela under Chavez for the negative effects of populist polarization on democracy. See McCoy and Somer, “Transformations,” that includes studies of the effects of populist polarization on the politics of eleven country cases that had been electoral democracies. 253. Laclau, Populist Reason, 74 ff. 254. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 18. 255. Rostboll, “Two Kinds of Polarization,” 10. 256. Paraphrasing Rostboll, ibid. 257. Ibid., 10. 258. Jean L. Cohen, “What’s Wrong with the Normative Theory (and the Actual Practice) of Left Populism,” Constellations 26, no. 3 (2019): 391–​407, doi:10.1111/​ 1467-​8675.12427. 259. Margaret Canovan, “Trust the People! Populism and the Two Faces of Democracy,” Political Studies 47, no. 1 (1999): 2–​16, doi:10.1111/​1467-​9248.00184. See also Margaret Canovan, The People (London: Polity Press, 2005), 131–​138, apparently endorsing the populist idea that we need a mythic conception of the people alongside a pragmatic one. 260. Sartori, Parties, 139. 261. McCoy, Rahman, and Somer, “Polarization,” 26–​27. 262. Sartori, Parties, 140. 263. See Meyer and Tarrow, Resistance, 1–​13, on the movementization of parties. 264. Kitschelt, “Movement Parties.” The best example was the ecological parties—​in particular the German Greens. But in their case, “taming” did not mean abandoning their deep commitments, here to ecology, but rather accepting the legitimacy of other parties’ willingness to cooperate and compromise while allowing movements with which they remain allied but are differentiated from to pursue their own autonomous tactics outside the party. 265. See the ­chapter 3 for a discussion of populism in power and its elective affinity with authoritarianism. 266. See the excursus on mobilization later in this chapter. 267. See later in this chapter. 268. For the tripartite framework of the functions of parties, looking at their role in the electorate as political organizations and as governing institutions, see Vladimir O. Key, Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (New York: Crowell, 1964). For earlier analyses see Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 102–​111 and Max Weber, “Class, Status and Party,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 180–​194; describing parties as crucial for the recruiting and training of political elites in mass democracies and in organizing parliament. For an analysis stressing the expressive role of mass parties and their inevitable transformation into organizational bureaucratic tools of elite leaders see Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1915).

Notes  251 269. Sartori, Parties, 25–​29, 56–​57; he deems the representation role to be less specific to parties and possible without them. 270. Ibid., 28. 271. Mair, Ruling the Void, 89–​90. 272. Manin, Representative Government, 206–​218. 273. Sartori, Parties, 28–​29. 274. Ibid. See also Manin, Representative Government, 206–​218. 275. Mair, Ruling the Void, 92. Duverger, Political Parties. Duverger like Michels, saw parties as the tool of its members, foregrounding the representative function of their base. Thus, the focus on office seeking and elections seems to pit one function of political parties—​the goal of gaining governmental power—​against another one, namely being an instrument of its membership for programmatic goals. These assumptions undergirded Michels’ iron law of oligarchy thesis. 276. See Weber’s classic analysis regarding the first two on parties and functioning parliamentary party government and see the analysis in Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 5–​10, using Key’s tripartite framework. Mair, Ruling the Void, 94–​98, describes this as one of two procedural functions of parties, the other being governing. 277. Duverger, Political Parties, 203, frames the competitive interaction among party units, i.e., party systems in terms of “the forms and modes of their coexistence.” See also the comprehensive analysis of party systems in Sartori, Parties, 117–​342. 278. Mair, Ruling the Void, 89–​98. Mair argues that unlike the traditional mass party, contemporary parties focus almost exclusively on the governing role. 279. Sartori, Parties, 3–​29; Nancy Rosenblum, Angels, 1–​21. 280. Sartori, Parties, 45–​46, 57–​58. 281. See the discussion in Dalton and Wattenberg, Parties without Partisans, 5–​10. 282. della Porta et al., Austerity, 194. But she seems more optimistic about contributions to democratization than Gerbaudo or us. 283. Gerbaudo, Digital Party, 179–​183. Gerbaudo focuses on the digital party form but the rhetoric is populist and not all populist movement parties are fully digital parties like the M5S so we prefer the term populist movement party. 284. Ibid., 181. 285. Ibid., and della Porta et al., Austerity, 173, citing Roberts on the distinction between plebiscitary and participatory linkages. 286. Paraphrasing Sartori, Parties, 141. 287. This is true of left populism in power throughout Latin America. See Kurt Weyland, “The Threat from the Populist Left,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (2013): 18–​32, doi:10.1353/​ jod.2013.0045; Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York/​London: Routledge, 2019), 334–​350. 288. On hyper-​globalization, see ­chapter 1 of this book and Dani Rodrik, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy (New York: Norton & Company, 2011).

252 Notes

Chapter 3 1. Zsolt Enyedi and Stephen Whitfield, “Populists in Power: Populism and Representation in Illiberal Democracies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) first made this distinction. 2. Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941). 3. Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in the Andes,” Democratization 20, no. 1 (2013): 107–​ 136, doi:10.1080/​ 13510347.2013.738864; Steven Levitsky, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism,” presentation, Global Populisms as a Threat to Democracy Conference, Stanford University, November 3–​4, 2017. 4. Karl Loewenstein, “Reflections on the Value of Constitutions in Our Revolutionary Age,” in Constitutions and Constitutional Trends since World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1955), 191–​224. 5. For an early attempt see Enrique Peruzzotti, “Populism as Democratization’s Nemesis: The Politics of Regime Hybridization,” Chinese Political Science Review 2, no. 3 (2017): 314–​327, doi:10.1007/​s41111-​017-​0070-​2. 6. For an early version of this distinction see Andrew Arato, “Populism, Constitutional Courts and Civil Society,” in Judicial Power: How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 318–​341. 7. See c­ hapter 5 for our discussion of liberal and democratic constitutionalism. 8. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 1–​28, 492–​605. 9. Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes,” 107–​136; Levitsky, “Competitive Authoritarianism”; and Aziz Z. Huq and Tom Ginsburg, “How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy,” UCLA Law Review 65, no. 78 (2017): 80–​ 169, doi:10.2139/​ssrn.2901776. 10. The same is not true of complementing representative democracy with other participatory forms, many rooted in civil society. One of us pointed this out to Linz at a Budapest conference, in 1989, but without getting him to understand the difference. Yet they adopted a view more like ours in Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-​Communist Europe (JHU Press, 1996). 11. See ­chapters 2 and 5 of this text for our analysis of the political, social, and economic imbalances behind these deficits. 12. Larry J. Diamond, “Thinking about Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 21–​35, doi:10.1353/​jod.2002.0025. 13. Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “What Democracy Is . . . and Is Not,” Journal of Democracy 2, no. 3 (1991): 75–​88, doi:10.1353/​jod.1991.0033. 14. Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 15. Guillermo A. O’Donell, “Delegative Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (1994): 55–​69, doi:10.1353/​jod.1994.0010; Terry Lynn Karl, “The Hybrid Regimes of Central America,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 3 (1995): 72–​86, doi:10.1353/​

Notes  253 jod.1995.0049, 72–​73, introducing the term hybrid to refer to a regime that combines democratic and authoritarian elements; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Diamond, “Hybrid Regimes,” 21–​35; Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher, 2006). 16. For the minimalist definition of democracy see Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Milton Park: Routledge Press, 2013), 260–​283; Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), 111–​120. 17. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 122, 130; criticizing Schumpeter’s minimalist theory. 18. Charles Taylor, “Democratic Regeneration: Three Easy Paths to Regression,” Fritz Stern Lecture, 2017; Charles Taylor, “Walter-​Benjamin-​Lectures,” lecture, Humanities and Social Change Center at Humboldt University, 2019. 19. Taylor, “Walter-​Benjamin-​Lectures,” 3. 20. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 83–​96. 21. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society; Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 22. Schmitter and Karl, “What Democracy Is,” 76. 23. Lucan A. Way, “Authoritarian Failure: How Does State Weakness Strengthen Electoral Competition,” in Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher, 2006), 169. 24. Way, “Authoritarian Failure,” 169. 25. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 221. 26. Way, “Authoritarian Failure,” 169. 27. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 2–​4. 28. Ibid., 2–​4. 29. Ibid., 16–​17. The place of power is a symbolic space that provides a principle of internalization defining society’s basic unity and coherence and its internal divisions in relation to an outside. The mise en form defines intelligibility within a society and provides society with a symbolic pole of representation through which it can refer to itself. In a democracy this occurs without reference or gesture toward a transcendent outside higher order, religious or otherwise. Democracy is thus without foundations imputable to the gods or human nature. For this dimension see ibid., 213–​255. 30. Ibid., 19. 31. Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 256–​260. 32. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 89–​90. 33. This universalizes an old republican idea. See Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

254 Notes 34. Hans Kelsen, The Essence and Value of Democracy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013). 35. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 7; Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics, 113, 119, 221–​222; for another set of these minima see Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 87. 36. Kelsen, Essence and Value, 67–​68. 37. Ibid. 38. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2018). 39. Ibid., 8–​9. 40. Huq and Ginsberg, “How to Lose,” 87. 41. Ibid., 86–​92. 42. See Jean L. Cohen, “What’s Wrong with the Normative Theory (and the Actual Practice) of Left Populism,” Constellations 26, no. 3 (2019): 391–​407, doi:10.1111/​ 1467-​8675.12427; arguing that today liberal constitutional democracy is a palimpsest whatever the historical genesis and tensions between them. The issue is a matter of balance, not antagonism. See c­ hapter 5 of this text on the question of balancing constitutionalism and popular sovereignty. See also Marc F. Plattner, “From Liberalism to Liberal Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 3 (1999): 121–​134, doi:10.1353/​ jod.1999.0053. 43. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society. 44. On this see Cristina Lafont, Democracy without Shortcuts: A Participatory Conception of Deliberative Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 45. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, chap. 10. 46. Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy. 47. Ibid., 7–​8. 48. Ibid., 8–​9. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 244. 51. Ibid., 266–​273. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. This is excellent as an analysis but Rosanvallon does not look at populism in power nor does he provide an analysis of why populism emerges when it does. 54. Lefort, Democracy, 17–​20; and Lefort, Political Forms; analyzing totalitarianism in these terms. 55. Margaret Canovan, The People (London: Polity Press, 2005), 124–​141. Canovan wrongly believes that she is translating Arendt’s distinction between the political and politics, between extraordinary and normal moments in time. In fact, quite different views of extraordinary politics are involved: a communication model emphasizing plurality, as against a populist conception with its stress on unity. 56. However, pace Kelsen, Essence and Value; where he endorses relativism, the alternative to monism and dogmatic absolutism in the political realm is not relativism. Instead democratic epistemology requires reflexivity. See Pascal D. König and Markus B. Siewert, “Off Balance: Systematizing Deformations of Liberal Democracy,”

Notes  255 International Political Science Review, 2020, 019251212091572, doi:10.1177/​ 0192512120915721. 57. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, 1–​29, 421–​563; Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 341–​387. 58. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); Andrew Arato, “Political Theology and Populism,” Social Research 80, no. 1 (2013): 143–​172. 59. Ibid. 60. Robert R. Barr, “Populists, Outsiders and Anti-​Establishment Politics,” Party Politics 15, no. 1 (2009): 29–​48, doi:10.1177/​1354068808097890 accordingly distinguishes between “maverick” populists—​political insiders who abandon established parties and make personalistic anti-​establishment appeals (i.e., Rafael Caldera and Fernando Collor de Mello) and “movement populists”—​anti-​establishment outsiders who emerge from social movements and maintain movement grassroot linkages (Evo Morales initially in Bolivia). But one can morph from one to other. See Kenneth Roberts, “Left, Right and the Populist Structuring of Political Competition,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 149–​162. 61. Roberts, “Populist Structuring.” See Raúl L. Madrid, “The Emergence of Ethno-​ Populism in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019). 62. See Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (1990): 51–​69. 63. Max Weber, “Politics as Vocation,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 102–​111. 64. The most recent example is Italy, with the alliance between the M5S and Lega Norde. 65. When Tea Party radicals hijacked the Republican party in Congress after the 2008 election of President Obama, they engaged in relentless obstructionism and purposeful gridlock, exhibiting a near absolute unwillingness to cooperate in getting government business done. 66. Linz, “Perils.” 67. Andrew Arato, “Constitutional Courts.” We are arguing against János Kis, “Demokráciából Autokráciába,” Politikaitudományi Szemle (Budapest), no. 1 (2019): 45–​71, who is following János Kornai, “Még egyszer a rendszerparadigmáról,” Közgazdasági Szemle 63 (2016): 1074–​1119. We do not however consider such attacks, even if coordinated and serious, identical to the completion of the establishment of a new autocratic regime. 68. Peruzzotti, “Democratization’s Nemesis.” See also Enrique Peruzzotti, “Populism and Democratic Hybridization,” presentation, Columbia University Political Theory Workshop, October 2019, on hand with authors. 69. Other types of executives can do this as well. But the role of populism is central in all this for systematic reasons. Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes.” See also Levitsky, “Competitive Authoritarianism.” 70. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; and Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose.” 71. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 97–​117.

256 Notes 72. Ibid., 106 ff. 73. Ibid., 109. 74. Levitsky, “Competitive Authoritarianism,” 4. 75. These steps need not be construed sequentially. See c­ hapter 5. 76. Kurt Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019), 320. 77. Levitsky and Loxton, “Competitive Authoritarianism,” 112; Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism,” 320, 325–​331. Neither Orbán, nor Erdogan nor Putin were populist outsiders when they came to power but their populist commitments adopted thereafter undergird their willingness to flout democratic norms. 78. Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism.” 79. O’Donnell, “Delegative Democracy”; referring to transitions out of authoritarian rule but not to fully consolidated representative democracy. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid., 60. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 86–​87; on the populist relation to constitutionalism as linked to the rule of law. See also c­ hapter 5 of this text. 85. An excellent treatment of this with respect to civil society inclusion/​exclusion is in Anna Fejős and Dorottya Szikra, eds., Támogatás és Támadás (Budapest, 2021, forthcoming). 86. Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism,” 324–​325; Kurt Weyland, “The Threat from the Populist Left,” Journal of Democracy 24, no. 3 (2013): 18–​32, doi:10.1353/​ jod.2013.0045. See also Ozan O. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism,” Iowa Law Review 100 (2015): 1673–​1842. 87. Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism,” 331, ascribes these tendencies in part to the uninstitutionalized and thus fickle bonds of populist leaders to their followers. 88. Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 157–​160. 89. Enrique Peruzzotti, “Populism in Democratic Times: Populism, Representative Democracy and the Debate on Democratic Deepening,” in Latin American Populism of the Twenty-​First Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); and Peruzzotti, “Democratic Hybridization,” 11. 90. Ibid. 91. Echoing the tenets of delegative democracy described by O’Donell, “Delegative Democracy.” 92. Laclau, On Populist Reason, 164–​171; criticizing Lefort for identifying democracy with keeping the place of power empty. 93. See O’Donell “Delegative Democracy,” 59–​60. See also Arato, “Political Theology.” 94. On the paternalism of populism see Paloma Caravantes, “Tensions between Populist and Feminist Politics: The Case of the Spanish Left Populist Party Podemos,” International Political Science Review, 2020, 019251212093120, doi:10.1177/​ 0192512120931209.

Notes  257 95. Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 157–​160. See also Carlos De La Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 96. Javier Corrales, “Autocratic Legalism in Venezuela,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 2 (2015): 37–​51, doi:10.1353/​jod.2015.0031; and Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 72–​96. 97. Nancy Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding,” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 5–​19, doi:10.1353/​jod.2016.0012. 98. Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism,” 324. On “discriminatory legalism” see also Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 153–​157. 99. Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy, 267. Nadia Urbinati follows his lead in Democracy Disfigured (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). 100. Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy. 101. János Kornai, Látlelet: Tanulmányok A Magyar Állapotokról (Diagnosis: Studies on the Hungarian Situation) (Budapest: HVG, [2011] 2017); Kis, “Demokráciából autokráciába.” 102. A hybrid regime is a distinct type. Just as a donkey is neither a horse nor a mule, so a hybrid regime is sui generis. This is forgotten by theorists who use the concept but then situate the relevant regimes under the rubric either of qualified authoritarianism or qualified democracy. 103. Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publisher, 2000), 49–​63, 159–​261; on the concept of authoritarian regimes. 104. Diamond, “Hybrid Regimes.” 105. Ibid., 24. 106. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 3–​ 20; Diamond, “Hybrid Regimes”; and Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism, 1–​26. 107. Linz, Totalitarian Regimes, 159–​267; for the subtypes of authoritarianism and classifications of world states. 108. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 5. 109. Ibid. For other discussion of hybrid regime types see Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism, 3–​6; and Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 1–​7 and n. 19. 110. Note the difference with Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism, n. 83, whose category of electoral authoritarianism refers to all authoritarian regimes with multiparty elections, competitive and hegemonic. 111. Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism, 3–​7; cited in Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 16, to differentiate their narrower conception from his. 112. Linz, Authoritarian Regimes, 34, 1–​38; the new introduction to this text, in which Linz also deems competitive authoritarian regimes a subtype of authoritarianism. 113. Ibid.; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 7. For the role of populist executives in constructing competitive authoritarian regimes contributing to regime change see Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes.” 114. Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism, 3; arguing that these regimes violate liberal democratic principles of freedom and fairness so profoundly and systematically that to classify them as democratic makes little sense even if they are minimally competitive.

258 Notes 115. Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 80; calling this steady derogation of democratic principles under the mask of law “democratic backsliding,” following Bermeo, “Democratic Backsliding,” 13–​15. 116. O’Donell, “Delegative Democracy,” 59. 117. Ibid., 4; and Diamond, “Hybrid Regimes.” 118. For an early analysis see Levitsky and Loxton “Populism in the Andes” and later Peruzzotti, “Democratic Hybridization.” 119. Ibid. For an analysis focused on the role of populist executives in triggering this sort of regime change in new and relatively weak democracies in the Andes in Latin America, see Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes.” For an analysis oriented toward the dangers of this happening in more consolidated democracies such as the United States see Levitsky, “Competitive Authoritarianism.” 120. Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes,” 109. They focused on Bolivia, Ecuador Peru, and Venezuela. 121. Ibid., 110–​111. Erdogan in Turkey and Orban in Hungary are atypical in this regard. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid. See c­ hapter 3 on populism and constitutionalism. 125. According to Levitsky and Loxton, of the eleven presidents elected in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela, all four cases of full populism, including the successful movement populism of Morales, slid into a new non-​democratic hybrid regime type while none of the other eight non-​populist governments did so. See their list of democratic regimes that did not have populist leaders and remained democratic even in contexts of crisis in Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes,” 112–​113. 126. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism.” 127. Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 86, 95–​96. 128. Yet they fudge the distinction between illiberal democracy, semi-​democracy, and competitive authoritarianism. Huq and Ginsburg, “How to Lose,” 122. 129. Ibid. 130. Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes.” See the charts on pages 113–​114. 131. Ibid. 132. Fraenkel, The Dual State. A dual state has two legal orders: a normative one for ordinary everyday legal issues and a prerogative one based on the arbitrariness of the will of the authoritarian leader and the leader’s circle. Typically, the prerogative state trumps the normative one in case of clash. 133. Arato, “Constitutional Courts,” 330. 134. Ibid., 331–​332. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 137. Csaba Tóth, “Full Text of Viktor Orbán’s Speech at Băile Tuşnad (Tusnádfürdő) of 26 July 2014,” The Budapest Beacon, 2014, https://​budapestbeacon.com/​full-​text-​of-​ viktor-​orbans-​speech-​at-​baile-​tusnad-​tusnadfurdo-​of-​26-​july-​2014/​.

Notes  259 138. Ibid. Among the non-​liberal governments Orbán openly praised in his 2014 speech were Singapore, China, Turkey, India, and Russia. He said that perhaps they aren’t even democracies but indicated they could handle the 2008 crisis better than liberal polities. 139. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, [1923, 1926] 1988). To be sure, he knew the work of 19th century liberals like Benjamin Constant, critical of the dynamics of supposed democratic dictatorships in the aftermath of the French Revolution. 140. Ibid., 1–​51. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., 22–​30; Weyland, “Populism and Authoritarianism”; Cohen, “What’s Wrong.” 143. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Laclau, On Populist Reason, 84–​93. 144. Schmitt, Crisis. 145. Ibid., 25–​32. 146. Ibid., 28, 51–​65. 147. Ibid. 148. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, 201–​255; and Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political. 149. Schmitt, Crisis, 51–​65. 150. O’Donell, “Delegative Democracy.” 151. Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76, no. 6 (1997): 22, doi:10.2307/​20048274. Zakaria referred in particular to competitive albeit not fully free or fair multi-​party elections with some protections of assembly and speech and broad enfranchisement of the citizenry. 152. Ibid., 24. 153. Ibid., 22–​43. 154. Ibid., 30. We added freedoms and equality. 155. Ibid., 30–​31. 156. Ibid., 40. 157. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 52. 158. Linz, Authoritarian Regimes, 34. 159. Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 80–​118; and especially Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018). And Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005), especially 36–​50. Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 24–​98. 160. Ibid.; Mouffe, Left Populism. Note her cooperation with figures including Pablo Iglesias and Íñigio Errejón from Podemos in Spain and Jean-​Luc Mélonchon from La France Insoumise and presidential candidate in 2017. 161. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 36–​50. 162. Mouffe, Left Populism, 36–​40, 48–​49. 163. Ibid., 39–​50, 80. 164. Ibid., 14. 165. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 8–​9.

260 Notes 166. Mouffe, Left Populism, 13–​16. 167. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 10. 168. For our analysis of the imbalance between popular sovereignty and constitutionalism inspiring populists, see c­ hapter 5 of this text. 169. Cohen, “What’s Wrong.” 170. Mouffe, Left Populism, 65. 171. Elizabeth S. Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?,” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–​ 337, doi:10.1086/​233897. 172. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 173. Ibid. 174. Mouffe, Left Populism, 65. 175. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Pluto Press, 1950). It is debatable whether Marshall really sought social rights as distinct from state benefits, especially because he did not endorse unions or collective bargaining as vehicles for ensuring social justice and the autonomy of workers organizations. For an alternative view see Hugh A. Clegg, Industrial Democracy and Nationalization (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951). 176. Mouffe, Left Populism, 14. 177. Jean L. Cohen, “Rethinking the Politics of Human Rights and Democracy with and beyond Lefort,” in Claude Lefort—​Thinker of the Political (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 124–​135. 178. This included 35 regimes that had been or became competitive authoritarian between 1990 and 1995 and spanned five regions: including six countries in the Americas (the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, and Nicaragua); six in Eastern Europe (Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia); three in Asia (Cambodia, Malaysia, and Taiwan); six in the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine) and 14 in Africa (Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe). Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 20–​21, found that 19 of these 35 cases remained competitive authoritarian for 15 or more years. 179. Levitsky and Loxton, “Populism in the Andes.” 180. Ibid., 108; the role of populist executives in pushing regimes over the threshold into competitive authoritarianism is documented for Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia. See the chart on pages 113–​114. 181. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 14–​15. 182. Ibid., 17. We agree that competitive authoritarianism in general is a post–​Cold War phenomenon. Some populist competitive authoritarian regimes also emerged out of closed authoritarian regimes. 183. “Mentalities,” for Linz, refers to psychic dispositions that lack a utopian element. They are ways of thinking and feeling that are more emotional than rational, provide no codified ways of reacting to different situations, and are tantamount to a psychic predisposition. Alternatively, Linz sees ideological belief systems as based

Notes  261 on fixed elements, also characterized by strong affect but involving closed cognitive structures. Linz, Authoritarian Regimes, 162. 184. Ibid., 161–​162. 185. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 6–​7; citing Schedler. 186. Linz, Authoritarian Regimes, 184–​261; for the seven subtypes of authoritarian regimes. 187. Ibid., 221. See Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017). 188. Linz, Authoritarian Regimes, 192, 221, 225. 189. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 1–​38. 190. Ibid., 27–​31. 191. Ibid., 20–​21. 192. Ibid., 21. 193. See c­ hapter 2 of this text. 194. See c­ hapter 4 on this.

Chapter 4 1. Cas Mudde, “Are Populists Friends or Foes of the Constitution?,” policy paper, Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, 2013. The point is made more generally, and in our view rightly, by Jan-​Werner Müller, “Populism and Constitutionalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 590; Jan-​ Werner Müller, “Populist Constitutionalism: A Contradiction in Terms?,” working paper, NYU Colloquium, 2015 http://​www.law.nyu.edu/​sites/​default/​files/​upload_​ documents/​ J WMueller%20-​ N YULaw-​ Populist%20Constitutionalism.pdf, 2020; and Gábor Halmai, “Is There Such Thing as ‘Populist Constitutionalism?’ The Case Of Hungary,” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 11 (2018): 323–​339. cadmus.eui.eu/​bitstream/​handle/​1814/​59969/​Halmai_​Populist_​ Constitutionalism.pdf?sequence = 1 2. Again, not between populism and constitutionalism, as Mény and Surel, followed by Blokker, state. When populism appears early in a democratic transformation (as in the case of Jean Paul Marat in the early 1790s or Istvan Csurka two hundred years later), it is a critique or denunciation, usually sectarian, of the balance in the process established between democracy and constitutionalism. See Yves Mény and Yves Surel, Par Le Peuple, Pour Le Peuple (Paris: Fayard, 2000) and Paul Blokker, “Populist Constitutionalism,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2018). 3. In this sense, Theo Fournier, “From Rhetoric to Action: A Constitutional Analysis of Populism,” working paper, EUI LAW 08 (2018), doi:10.2139/​ ssrn.3127403 considers constitutional democracy a host ideology of populism, a view that corresponds to Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018). But Fournier restricts the notion to populism as a form of opposition and argues that in power the parasite rebels against and tendentially kills the host.

262 Notes 4. This is the view of Mény and Surel, Par Le Peuple, and Akritas Kaidatzis, “Populist Constitutionalism as a Critique on Liberal (or Legal) Constitutionalism,” presentation, New Constitutionalism? New Forms of Democracy and Rule of Law beyond Liberalism Workshop, International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Oñati, 2018. 5. See Halmai, “Populist Constitutionalism”; Müller, “Populism and Constitutionalism.” 6. David Landau, “Abusive Constitutionalism,” UC Davis Law Review 47, no. 1 (2013): 189; David Landau and Rosalind Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review: Courts against Democracy,” UC Davis Law Review 1313, no. 53 (2020). 7. See Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making; and the Adventures of the Constituent Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), chap. 6–​7. 8. David Landau, “Personalism and the Trajectories of Populist Constitutions,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 16, no. 1 (2020): 293–​309, doi:10.1146/​ annurev-​lawsocsci-​041420-​113519. 9. Anselmi for example considers only the governmental stage relevant to what he calls “constitutional populism.” See Manuel Anselmi, Populism: An Introduction (New York; London: Routledge, 2018), 87. We mostly agree, as will be seen later, but not completely. 10. Some instances of this are mentioned by Fournier for the UK (Brexit). In the most interesting case of Italy, where many speak of a plurality of competing populism, see Blokker, “Populist Constitutionalism.” While he is right to detect a common populist attitude in different constitutional projects (those of Berlusconi and Renzi), we think that there is a difference between a populist leadership movement and attempts to preempt the populist attacks by taking over some of their positions and critiques of existing form of government, that in Italy seems quite justified in any case. To try to preempt can be a big mistake, as David Cameron found out with respect to the Brexit referendum. Note also that two populist parties, Five Star and the Lega, helped to defeat the Renzi executive, strengthening their proposal, without renouncing possible constitutional claims of their own. 11. Some, such as Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, have even expressed a conservative attitude to the constitution in place, resisting efforts of others to change it. See: José Marcos and Anabel Díez, “Spain’s Acting PM Wants Constitutional Change to Prevent New Stalemates,” El País, 2019, https://​english.elpais.com/​elpais/​2019/​07/​11/​inenglish/​ 1562859165_​143284.html. 12. See Nicolás Figueroa García-​Herreros, “Counter-​Hegemonic Constitutionalism: The Case of Colombia,” Constellations 19, no. 2 (2012): 235–​247, doi:10.1111/​j.1467-​ 8675.2012.00682.x, followed by one of us, in Arato, Post Sovereign. According to García-​Herreros, non-​populist movement and political leaderships were the dynamic factors in this process, which was given a radical populist interpretation by the Supreme Court. Only partially similar, the Bolivian experience in 2005–​2007 indicates the combination of pluralistic grassroots and populist leader oriented perspectives. See: Raúl Madrid, “Bolivia: Origins and Policies of the Movimiento Al Socialismo,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 239–​259; Nancy Postero, ““El Pueblo Boliviano, De Composición Plural”: A

Notes  263 Look at Plurinationalism in Bolivia,” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015). 13. Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review.” 14. See Fournier, “Rhetoric to Action,” who uses this term, but thinks it applies to populism only in opposition, not in the government. This depiction corresponds to a theory such as that of Mouffe, Left Populism. But even in government, the parasite may only attack the host, while also relying on it. That will be the argument here. 15. Left populism is supposed to be reformist, as Chantal Mouffe’s interpretation advocates, a position explicitly claimed by Camila Vergara, “Populism as Plebeian Politics: Inequality, Domination, and Popular Empowerment,” Journal of Political Philosophy 28, no. 2 (2019): 222–​246, doi:10.1111/​jopp.12203. 16. Michael Coppedge, “Venezuela: The Rise and Fall of Patriarchy,” in Constructing Democratic Governance: South America in the 1990s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and for Europe see Mouffe, Left Populism. 17. Mudde, “Friends or Foes,” was first to claim and document such constitutional opportunism; Luigi Corrias, “Populism in a Constitutional Key: Constituent Power, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Identity,” European Constitutional Law Review 12, no. 1 (2016): 6–​26, doi:10.1017/​s1574019616000031; see also Blokker, “Populist Constitutionalism,” who speaks of constitutional instrumentalism and Kaidatzis “Populist Critique” describing an “opportunistic” attitude: “Where a constitution helps them advance their causes, they will endorse and support it; where not, they will . . . criticize it, pervert its meaning, or try to amend it when they come to power.” Such opportunism according to Mudde, is both when in opposition and in government. 18. Nevertheless, analysts who wish to argue that there is a distinct populist constitutional theory are forced to admit that it is “largely implicit,” see Corrias, “Constitutional Key,” 8. Corrias stressed the idea of the absolute primacy and continued presence of the constituent power, a point one of us made with respect to Laclau and Colon-​Rios in Arato, Post Sovereign, chap. 6–​7. 19. Yet amazingly enough, the word “constitution” is not to be found in the two most recent books on populism of either Laclau and Mouffe, neither of whom ever spell out the contents of their idea of foundation or re-​foundation. This all the more strange, since Laclau supported Peronism and Chavismo, to whom projects of constitutional replacement were central. 20. While very few serious analysts (but for example Mark Tushnet, Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001]) conflate “popular” and “populist,” many treat popular constitutionalism and populist constitutional politics together, sometimes to contrast them (Müller, “Populism and Constitutionalism”; Halmai, “Populist Constitutionalism”) and at times to establish a relationship (Blokker, “Populist Constitutionalism”; Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique”). We side with both of these approaches. We think the differences are very clear, yet if the normative assumptions, often hidden, of populism are to be explored as they must, popular (and political) constitutionalism give us important clues. This is especially true for populism in the form of critique of liberal constitutionalism.

264 Notes 21. On their relationship to populism see Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique,” vs. Halmai, “Populist Constitutionalism” and Müller, “Populism and Constitutionalism.” Also see Paul Blokker, New Democracies in Crisis?: A Comparative Constitutional Study of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia (New York; London: Routledge, 2013). 22. See Mény and Surel, Par Le Peuple. By our definition, and most others currently in circulation, these authors are not populists, any more than the “popular” constitutionalists, or for that matter see Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), who shares their critique. 23. As claimed by Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique.” 24. The argument is falsified even by French history, where judicialization represented by the Conseil Constitutionnel from 1971 clearly meant the improvement of democracy over the personalist rule of de Gaulle. The example is mentioned by the authors on page 13 implying a departure from the traditional French revolutionary (“Jacobin”) model. For a different view of the role of the judiciary see: Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-​Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 25. Said Amir Arjomand, Constitutionalism and Political Reconstruction (Boston: Brill, 2007), 1–​43. 26. Colin Crouch, Post-​Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004); Colin Crouch, The Globalization Backlash (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). 27. See Andrew Arato, “Populism, Constitutional Courts and Civil Society,” in Judicial Power: How Constitutional Courts Affect Political Transformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 318–​341. 28. Arato, Constitutional Courts, 49. One of us has criticized Christoph Möllers for making a similar claim in justifying what he called “constitutional populism.” See, Arato Post Sovereign, 7ff. 29. For perhaps the most polemical version of the argument, actually self-​identified as populist, see Tushnet, Taking the Constitution Away. For a highly systematic argument, see also Jeremy Waldron, “The Core of the Case against Judicial Review,” The Yale Law Journal 115, no. 6 (2006): 1346, doi:10.2307/​20455656. 30. While apex courts never claim to embody sovereignty, some of their defenders do so at times, see for example Kim L. Scheppele, who uses the unlovely word “courtocracy” instead of the more elegant “juristocracy” of Hirschl. Kim L. Scheppele, “Democracy by Judiciary. Or, Why Courts Can Be More Democratic than Parliaments.” Rethinking the Rule of Law after Communism 25 (2005): 44. 31. Jeremy Waldron, “Constitutionalism: A Skeptical View,” Public Law Research Paper, NYU School of Law, no. 10-​87 (2012): 1–​46. 32. Bruce Ackerman, We the People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, 2000), vol. 1 and 2. 33. Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 34. See the discussion by Andrew Arato, Civil Society, Constitution and Legitimacy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), chap. 3.

Notes  265 35. See David Ost, The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). The 2005 Program of the Law and Justice for a fourth republic was little more than a set of nationalist, moralistic Catholic-​ oriented, and anti-​Communist slogans (the project of constitution IV RP made by Prawo i Sprawiedliwość). See “Konstytucja IV Rzeczypospolitej,” 2005, https://​ doi.org/​10.31268/​PS.2018.06; https://​web.archive.org/​web/​20070716132651/​; http://​ www.pis.org.pl/​doc.php?d = unit&id = 7. 36. See Arato, Post Sovereign. 37. “Magyarország Alaptörvénye, (Indoklás. Általános Indoklás). [Hungary’s Basic Law. Justification. General Justification],” Parlament Hungary, 2011, https://​ www.parlament.hu/​irom39/​02627/​02627.pdf. 38. The constitutional program of the FPÖ, the Austrian Freedom Party, called for a third republic, in similar terms, at least until Haider’s entry into a governmental coalition. 39. We follow Fournier’s summary, in Fournier, “Rhetoric to Action,” 6ff. The text he cites is inoperative, publicly, because since suppressed by the FN. 40. Paul Blokker, “Populism and Constitutional Reform. The Case of Italy,” in Italian Populism and Constitutional Law: Strategies, Conflicts and Dilemmas (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 11–​38. 41. We follow de la Torre’s convincing analysis in Carlos De La Torre, Populist Seduction in Latin America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 35–​39; 52–​53; 68–​73. 42. Here we again rely on Nicolás Figueroa, “A Critique of Populist Jurisprudence,” doctoral dissertation, The New School, 2016. Also excellent is, Renata Segura and Ana M. Bejarano, “¡Ni Una Asamblea Más Sin Nosotros! Exclusion, Inclusion, and the Politics of Constitution-​Making in the Andes,” Constellations 11, no. 2 (2004): 217–​ 236. See also Arato, Post Sovereign, chap. 4–​5. 43. Segura and Bejarano, “Exclusion, Inclusion.” 44. Paradoxically the only actor with a (legally) populist theory within the process. On this see Figueroa, “Populist Jurisprudence,” for whom it is the action of the court that brought Colombia legally into the realm of populist constitution making. As he shows however, the subsequent decisions of the court established by the new constitution came to limit the sovereign constituent power, with the famous replacement doctrine. On this also Arato, Post Sovereign. 45. See even such critics of the Chavista process, as Allan-​Randolph Brewer-​Carías, Dismantling Democracy in Venezuela (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 46. Ibid. The vote was much higher than what Chavez received in any of his elections. 47. Madrid, “Bolivia”; Postero, “Pueblo Boliviano.” 48. Ibid.; Bolivia—​Final Report—​Constitutional Referendum 25 January 2009, European Union Election Observation Mission, https://​eeas.europa.eu/​archives/​eueom/​ missions/​2009/​bolivia/​pdf/​eueom_​bolivia_​2009_​final_​report_​en.pdf. 49. It seems the mixed electoral rule used for Congress was again applied, presumably by Congressional decision. 50. Postero, “Pueblo Boliviano,” 403. 51. Where MAS had a small majority in the lower chamber, but not in the Senate where the opposition was very slightly ahead.

266 Notes 52. Bolivia—​Final Report, 6. 53. We are relying on De La Torre, Populist Seduction, chap. 6. 54. The electoral rules were designed to be disproportional, but less so than in Venezuela. According to the EU mission: “The method of vote consolidation introduced by Congress in 2006, known as the “factor ponderador exacto” (translated to exact average weight factor), poses a concern since it may be deemed as challenging the equality of voting rights and/​or of voting power. The EU EOM would suggest a further assessment of its impact on the principle of one person one vote, equality of voting power . . . .” In any case the rules were enacted by Congress, where Correa did not have a majority, even an informal one. According to the EU mission some improvements were entailed by these rules, regarding gender representation for example. And, unlike in Venezuela, party lists were not excluded. 55. Bolivia—​Final Report, 6–​7. 56. Ibid. 57. In this section we are grateful for information from Prof. Nicolas Lynch and Prof. Nicolás Figueroa, both sent in a personal communication. 58. See Susan Stokes, “Peru: The Rupture of Democratic Rule,” in Constructing Democratic Governance: South America in the 1990s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 59. Charles Kenney, Fujimori’s Coup and the Breakdown of Democracy in Latin America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 60. See Stokes, “Peru,” 65ff, 70ff. It seems also that popular support for Fujimori’s coup in Peru itself was balanced by a large majority favoring return to constitutional government within a relatively short time period. Kenney, Fuijmori’s Coup, 156ff; 206. 61. Ibid., 20, 24. Including the left center, traditional populist APRA, the UI (united left) and the right-​wing AP. 62. Lynch, personal communication. 63. Stokes, “Peru.” 64. Maximilian Pichl, “Constitution of False Prophecies: The Illiberal Transformation of Hungary,” in Authoritarian Constitutionalism—​Comparative Analysis and Critique (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020); one of us has long criticized just this potentially authoritarian institutional mix of disproportional electoral rule and very flexible constitution. See Andrew Arato, “A Magyar Közjogi Rendszer Két Súlyos Fogyatékossága [Two Serious Liabilities of the Hungarian System of Public Law],” Magyar Hírlap, 1994. 65. The number of relevant constitutional amendments is disputed, because of the enactment of organic two-​thirds laws that resembled amendments. See Arato, Post Sovereign, chap. 4 and the texts in Gábor Attila Tóth, Constitution for a Disunited Nation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014); Kriszta Kovács, “Changing Constitutional Identity via Amendment,” in Constitutional Acceleration within the European Union and Beyond (New York; London: Routledge, 2018); Kriszta Kovács and Gábor Attila Tóth, “Hungary’s Constitutional Transformation,” European Constitutional Law Review 7, no. 2 (2011): 183–​ 203, doi:10.1017/​ s1574019611200038; Gábor Halmai, “The Rise and Fall of Constitutionalism in

Notes  267 Hungary,” in Constitutional Acceleration within the European Union and Beyond (New York; London: Routledge, 2018). 66. Kovács and Tóth, “Constitutional Transformation.” These authors generously responded to our questions in correspondence. 67. One of us did notice however: Andrew Arato, “Orban’s (Counter) Revolution of the Voting Booth and How It Was Made Possible,” Iconnectblog.Com, 2011, http://​www. iconnectblog.com/​2011/​04/​arato-​orbans-​counter-​revolution-​of-​the-​voting-​booth-​ and-​how-​it-​was-​made-​possible/​. 68. As Arato has repeatedly argued and as he and others claimed in an Amicus Brief to the Venice Commission. The counter-​argument, disregarding the case for implicit entrenchment, was that the initial four-​fifths requirement was not self-​entrenched, and that its enabling legislation was linked to a sunset clause coming into effect in 1998. Even that would make the removal by two-​thirds at best formally legal, but hardly legitimate. See Andrew Arato, “Regime Change, Revolution, and Legitimacy” and “Amicus,” both in Constitution for a Disunited Nation—​On Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012). 69. They were important preparation for court capture using all the possible the means of jurisdiction curbing, procedural changes, as well as court packing. For these instruments of abusive constitutionalism focusing on the apex court, see Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review.” 70. See Kriszta Kovács and Kim L. Scheppele, “The Fragility of an Independent Judiciary: Lessons from Hungary and Poland—​and the European Union,” in Legal Change in Post-​Communist States—​Progress, Reversions, Explanations (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2019). 71. See Halmai, “Constitutionalism in Hungary.” This claim is apparently contradicted by FIDESZ extending the number of 2/​3 laws. But the measure presupposed FIDESZ having the 2/​3, and the change of the electoral rule that was meant to guarantee the same. At most one can say that consensus democracy was partially preserved to limit the opposition that was not likely to achieve any 2/​3 majorities given its fragmentation, and the gerrymandered electoral law. 72. See Miklós Bánkuti, Gábor Halmai, and Kim L. Scheppele, “From Separation of Powers to a Government without Checks: Hungary’s Old and New Constitutions,” in Constitution for a Disunited Nation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012). 73. Ibid., 268. 74. Gábor Halmai, “A Coup against Constitutional Democracy: The Case of Hungary,” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 75. These are more or less the three tools of abusive constitutionalism stressed by Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review.” In our view though, the tool that should be emphasized is apex court capture rather than judicial review itself, whose abusive character on its own is tough to demonstrate, as their article focusing on intention and motivation reveals. Landau and Dixon too stress coercion and capture as the most important reason for abusive judicial practice.

268 Notes 76. They never have in the United States. Here statute is enough for recomposition of the Court engaged in judicial review, as was clear during F. D. Roosevelt’s failed effort at court packing. In Hungary, increasing number and changing jurisdiction took amendments strengthened eventually by replacement and amendments that for example invalidated all precedents before 2011. In Poland, the question whether statutes were enough to disempower the Constitutional Tribunal remained open till the full packing of the Court, when it became moot. In Venezuela and Ecuador, it was the “original” constituent power supposedly inherent in the constituyente that was relied on to reconstitute courts. 77. De La Torre, Populist Seduction, 87–​188; see Catherine M. Conaghan, “Ecuador: Rafael Correa and the Citizens’ Revolution,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2011), 271–​272. 78. On this see: Arato, Civil Society, chap. 5; and especially Kriszta Kovács, “Constitutional Continuity Disrupted,” in The Rise of Populist Nationalism: Social Resentments and Capturing the Constitution in Hungary (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019), 11–​42. 79. Ozan O. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism,” Iowa Law Review 100 (2015): 1673–​ 1842; Ozan O. Varol, “Stealth Authoritarianism in Turkey,” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 339–​354. 80. See András Bragyova, “No News(s), Good News? The Fundamental Law and the European Law,” in Constitution for a Disunited Nation—​On Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012). Even procedural amendment review was only gradually admitted by the Hungarian Court (and eventually conceded by the FIDESZ government), but the line between procedure and substance may be a fluid one in many cases, as Bragyova, himself a Constitutional Court judge at the time, implied. 81. This element was missing in Jellinek’s early theory of informal change for the good historical reason that the relevant constitutional courts were still a rarity. See Georg Jellinek, Verfassungsänderung Und Verfassungswandlung (Berlin: O. Häring Verlag, 1906). The role of the Court has been stressed by Ackerman for his theory of extra-​ Article V constitutional change. See Ackerman, We the People. In contrast, in our conception, while court confirmation is a necessary condition, democratic mobilization behind the change is not, even if present in some cases of populist authoritarianism, as previously in Peru and now in Brazil. 82. Four were substitute members, whose allegiances were known, and two were picked according to a purely majoritarian process in parliament. This was certainly not mere unpacking(!) as Asli Bali suggested. See Asli Bali, “Unpacking Turkey’s “Court-​Packing” Referendum,” MERIP, 2020, https://​merip.org/​2010/​11/​ unpacking-​turkeys-​court-​packing-​referendum/​. See Arato, Post Sovereign, chap. 5. Theoretically possible amendment review was still claimed but renounced in this all-​important context that led to court disempowerment through packing. 83. Wojciech Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). We rely here on his outstanding presentation of complex and often technical conflicts. Kovács and Scheppele, “Fragility”; fill in some of the missing

Notes  269 elements of Sandurski’s argument, concerning how packing was first resisted and how that resistance ended. 84. In Hungary the removal of a three-​quarters provision by two-​thirds played this symbolic role. 85. Sadurski, Poland’s Breakdown. 86. See Oliver W. Lembcke and Christian Boulanger, “Between Revolution and Constitution: The Roles of the Hungarian Constitutional Court,” in Constitution for a Disunited Nation—​On Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012): 269–​299; Arato, Post Sovereign. 87. Halmai, “Coup”; Kovács, “Changing Constitutional Identity.” 88. To make doubly sure, the limitation of constitutional review to procedural matters was itself lifted into the Basic Law by amendment see Magyarország Alaptörvénye Art, 24 (5), http://​www.kozlonyok.hu/​nkonline/​MKPDF/​hiteles/​MK18100.pdf. 89. Margarita López Maya, “Venezuela: Hugo Chavez and the Populist Left,” in The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 213–​239; also in De La Torre, Promise and Perils. 90. Brewer-​Carías, Dismantling Democracy. David Landau, “Constitution-​making and Authoritarianism in Venezuela: The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce,” Constitutional Democracy in Crisis (2018): 161–​176. 91. Brewer-​Carías, Dismantling Democracy, chap. 2, 337–​338. 92. Ibid.; Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review,” 1364; Landau, “Constitution-​ Making in Venezuela,” 167. 93. Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review,” 1364. 94. For the steps in this judicially steered and enforced process, weakening the separation of powers, amendment, recall, and emergency provisions of the Chavez Constitution see Landau, “Constitution-​Making in Venezuela” with the fitting subtitle “The First Time as Tragedy, the second as Farce.” 95. For the Colombia and Venezuela contrast, see Landau, “Abusive Constitutionalism”; Arato, Post Sovereign. 96. For Nicaragua see Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review,” 1361ff; for Ecuador see Carlos De La Torre, The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015); and Mauricio Guim and Augusto Verduga, “Is Ecuador Heading towards a Constitutional Crisis?,” Iconnectblog.Com, 2017, http://​www.iconnectblog.com/​2017/​11/​is-​ecuador-​heading-​towards-​a-​constitutional-​crisis/​. 97. Landau and Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review.” 98. Halmai, “Populist Constitutionalism”; Müller, “Populism and Constitutionalism.” 99. Admittedly, some defenders of at least versions of populism do take a crack at definitions. See Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugaric, “Populism and Constitutionalism: An Essay on Definitions and their Implications,” Dash.Harvard.Edu, 2020, https://​ dash.harvard.edu/​handle/​1/​42660123. Their “barebones definition” however locates constitutionalism traditionally in the liberal rule of law plus rights camp, that would (as they admit) lead to serious conflicts with many populisms. But in defining populism in the thinnest possible, and we think misleading, way as more

270 Notes or less the demand or practice of democratic majority rule (page 12ff), it is not surprising that they find some “populisms” (like the New Deal!) not to be in conflict with constitutionalism, and they even side with some “populists” (again like the New Deal!) when there are such conflicts. 100. Such is already a weakness of Günter Frankenberg, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Coming to Terms with Modernity’s Nightmares,” in Authoritarian Constitu­tionalism—​Comparative Analysis and Critique (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019), 1–​36. 101. For an example of the loose understanding of constitutionalism, see Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique.” 102. For two critiques from very different points of view see Giovanni Sartori, “Constitutionalism: A Preliminary Discussion,” American Political Science Review 56, no. 4 (1962): 853–​864, doi:10.2307/​1952788; and Jeremy Waldron, “A Skeptical View.” Interestingly their two definitions of constitutionalism seem to converge. 103. Charles Howard MacIlwain, Constitutionalism Ancient and Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1940), 21. 104. Sartori, “Constitutionalism”; and Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited (Chatham: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), 308–​309. 105. Waldron, “A Skeptical View.” 106. Richard Bellamy, “Constitutionalism,” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2010, https://​ www.britannica.com/​topic/​constitutionalism. 107. Dieter Grimm, “The Achievement of Constitutionalism and Its Prospects in a Changed World,” in The Twilight of Constitutionalism? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3–​20. 108. Arato Civil Society, chap. 4. 109. See the now growing literature on unconstitutional constitutional change: Yaniv Roznai, Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 110. Karl Loewenstein, “Reflections on the Value of Constitutions in Our Revolutionary Age,” in Constitutions and Constitutional Trends Since World War II (New York: New York University Press, 1955), 191–​224. 111. Frankenberg scoffs at these old distinctions of Loewenstein but winds up fully demonstrating them, with manual and program functions corresponding to the nominal, and identity card and showcase roles to the façade. Frankenberg, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” in Helena Alviar García and Günter Frankenberg, eds., Authoritarian Constitutionalism, 1–​37. 28–​35. Admittedly, this is a helpful differentiation to explain the purposes of drawing up authoritarian constitutions but does not yield a meaningful notion of constitutionalism. 112. Mark Tushnet, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Some Conceptual Issues,” in Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). At least two such continua are constructed by Frankenberg, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” 11–​13. One is the same as Tushnet’s between the poles of liberal and democratic constitutionalism and (undefined) authoritarian constitutionalism, the other between reflecting and eluding actual state practices. It is worth

Notes  271 noting that while the authors in the Ginsberg and Simpser, edition (Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser, eds., Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013]) with the exception of Tushnet speak only of authoritarian constitutions, while those in the Alviar and Frankenberg edition talk of authoritarian constitutionalism. 113. Tushnet, “Conceptual Issues,” 38–​39. 114. As Frankenberg, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” 11ff, unfortunately suggests. But see Hastings W. Okoth-​Ogendo, “Constitutions without Constitution­alism: Reflections on an African Political Paradox,” in Constitutionalism and Democracy: Transitions in the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 65–​84; Nathan J. Brown, Constitutions in a Nonconstitutional World: Arab Basic Laws and the Prospects for Accountable Government (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002); who nevertheless makes an argument for the possibility of Islamic Constitutionalism. 115. With Tushnet’s own “populist constitutional law” located on a relatively high level along with the political or republican constitutionalism of others. See: Taking the Constitution Away, chap. 8. As Halmai, “Populist Constitutionalism”; has argued none of current populist experiments correspond to this conception. 116. See Bojan Bugaric, “The Populists at the Gates: Constitutional Democracy Under Siege?,” presentation, Conference New York University School of Law, Jean Monnet Center for International and Regional Economic Law & Justice, 2017. We agree with him that democratic but non-​populist movements provide an alternative to both oligarchic forms of constitutionalism and populism. In his subsequent paper with Tushnet, Bugaric seems to be seeking that alternative within populism. See Tushnet and Bugaric, “Populism and Constitutionalism.” 117. Others have called it constitutional opportunism, as for example Kaidatzis citing Mudde in Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique,” 2; and Frankenberg, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” 14–​15. 118. Sadurski, Poland’s Constitutional Breakdown, 79ff. 119. Landau, “Abusive Constitutionalism,” 195; intention later add to this definition, by Dixon and Landau, when treating “Abusive Judicial Review,” 1326ff. We think politically if not legally the relevant practices should be called abusive whether the effect is intended or not. 120. Ibid.; Landau, “Abusive Constitutionalism”; each of which focuses on different institutional tools. 121. Clinton Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship—​Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies (Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 1948). 122. See Loewenstein, “Reflections”; Sartori, Democracy Revisited. We know different versions of these from Fascist Italy and the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the bureaucratic authoritarian regimes in Latin America. 123. See in particular Blokker, New Democracies, and Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique.” 124. Gábor Halmai has helpfully referred us to two Polish authors and one Hungarian who have explicitly attempted to establish the link between populist and political or republican constitutionalism, Morawski and Czarnota, who wish to locate the constitutional politics of the present government in Poland under republicanism

272 Notes or popular constitutionalism. As Blokker’s response shows, they both totally fail. For the discussion see Paul Blokker, “The Polish Constitutional Crisis and Institutional Self-​Defense Archives—​Verfassungsblog,” Verfassungsblog, 2017, https://​verfassungsblog.de/​category/​debates/​t he-​p olish-​constitutional-​crisis​and-​institutional-​self-​defense. 125. See Kaidatzis, “Populist Critique,” 16–​18. Why the second can be labeled “a constitutionalism” is unclear, even in terms of the authors own definition as well as depiction of the relevant practice. 126. In many respects following our conception of civil society and its regression after 1989 in Central Europe. See Arato, Civil Society, chap. 1–​2. 127. While Blokker certainly locates the populist trend within a revolutionary tradition, he is ambiguous whether this is the same as the democratic one. 128. Blokker’s own view, in 2017 at least, was that while there is convergence between populist and democratic critiques of liberal constitutionalism, as positive alternatives they represent divergent paths. Thus, in 2019, he affirms the critical role of populism, even as he again points to authoritarian logics. See Blokker, “Populist Constitutionalism.” 129. Blokker, “Populist Constitutionalism.” 130. Ibid. and Blokker, “Populism and Constitutional Reform.” 131. See articles by Helena Alviar García, “Neoliberalism as a Form of Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” 37–​56; and Duncan Kennedy, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism in Liberal Democracies,” 161–​ 184, both in Authoritarian Constitutionalism—​ Comparative Analysis and Critique (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019). 132. García, “Neoliberalism.” 133. See Frankenberg, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism,” 9. 134. Margarita López Maya, “Popular Power in the Discourse of Hugo Chavez’s Government (1999–​ 2013),” in The Promise and Perils of Populism: Global Perspectives (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015); Nancy Postero, “Pueblo Boliviano”; on Ecuador see Conaghan, “Ecuador.” 135. For non-​populist alternatives, see Arato, Post Sovereign. 136. Corrias, “Constitutional Key,” 6. 137. From many French Revolutionaries to Carl Schmitt (see Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre [Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1928]). Sieyès however had his doubts. See Emmanuel J. Sièyes, “Opinion De Sieyes, Sur Plusieurs Articles De Titres IV Et V Du Projet De Constitution,” Speech at the Convention, 1795. 138. See Gábor Attila Tóth, Constitution for a Disunited Nation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2014). 139. Landau, “Abusive Constitutionalism.” 140. For one of many critiques, see Waldron, “A Skeptical View.” 141. See Joel I. Cólon-​Ríos, Weak Constitutionalism: Democratic Legitimacy and the Question Of Constituent Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2012); and a critique in Arato, Post Sovereign, ­chapter 6. 142. Raúl L. Madrid, “The Emergence of Ethno-​ Populism in Latin America,” in Routledge Handbook of Global Populism (New York; London: Routledge, 2019).

Notes  273

Chapter 5 1. Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 412, 416–​420, 492–​563. 2. On these authors see: Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitutional Making; and The Adventures of the Constituent Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 96–​100, 162, 401–​402. 3. See the above citations to these authors. 4. Raymond Carré De Malberg, Contribution À La Théorie Générale De L’etat Spécialement D’après Les Données Fourniées Par Le Droit Constitutionnel Français (Paris: Sirey, 1920). 5. See Robert A. Dahl, Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), chap. 5. We disagree also with Nadia Urbinati’s concept of diarchy because it implies rule (archy) in civil publics, a mistake in our view. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 16-​81 6. Jürgen Habermas, “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure,” in Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998). 7. Cohen and Arato, Civil Society, 412, 416–​420, 492–​563. 8. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 9. Certainly not every institution must be based on elections, at least directly. Courts and administrations derive their legitimacy from the principles of equal treatment and impartiality, professional ethics and competence. But they too can be democratized in the sense of being accountable and so designed that they hue to their proper function, maintain their integrity, and avoid being instrumentalized for personal or particular political purposes. 10. Colin Crouch, Post-​Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 7ff, 23ff. 11. Ibid. 12. None of these leaders sought to illegitimately make their hold on power irreversible and none claimed to exclusively incarnate the people, rendering all opposition illegitimate. 13. Crouch even makes “personalism” a characteristic of his post-​democracy. Crouch, Post-​Democracy, 26–​28. While one way of seeing that is in terms of the democratic parabola, another equally plausible interpretation, the one he favors, is based on the decline and transformation of the media dominated public sphere. 14. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 15. Someone commented on this text claiming that Laclau does not use the word “demonization.” Alas, he does, along with “common hatred” for “a section of the population.” On Populist Reason, 70, and quite consistently with what he says on pages 78 and 83 and elsewhere. 16. See c­ hapter 4 of this text. 17. See Joel I. Cólon-​Ríos, Weak Constitutionalism: Democratic Legitimacy and the Question of Constituent Power (New York; London: Routledge, 2012).

274 Notes 18. Andrew Arato, “Multi-​Track Constitutionalism beyond Carl Schmitt,” Constellations 18, no. 3 (2011): 324–​351, doi:10.1111/​j.1467-​8675.2011.00641.x. 19. Arato, Post Sovereign. 20. Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (1990): 51–​ 69; Theodore J. Lowi, The Personal President (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). 21. Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (New York; London: Routledge, 2013). 22. Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-​One Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). 23. The obvious absurdity and destructive consequences of allowing the highest level of change located in a single, mono-​chamber body to be captured by the winner of a single election, especially given a highly disproportional electoral system, and the removal of higher-​level consensus requirement (three-​quarters) by votes attained on a lower level (two-​thirds) has been recently well demonstrated in Hungary. See Arato, Post Sovereign, chap. 4. 24. For two treatments of initial neo-​liberal success see Hilary Appel and Mitchell Alexander Orenstein, From Triumph to Crisis. Neoliberal Reform in Postcommunist Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism. The Left Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011). 25. Andrew Arato, “Socialism and Populism,” Constellations 26, no. 3 (2019): 464–​474, doi:10.1111/​1467-​8675.12428. 26. For recent restatements, see John Roemer, A Future for Socialism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Axel Honneth, The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2016). 27. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 28. For the most recent persuasive work on this subject see Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014). 29. Apel and Orenstein’s term in From Triumph to Crisis. A neutral or even positive translation of the critical concept of race to the bottom. 30. See Kornai’s works before1989 (e.g., János Kornai, Contradictions and Dilemmas [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986]). Even if he took his originally market socialist insights in a primarily economically liberal direction; see also Bockman, Markets. That socialists can follow Kornai’s strictures is shown by Roemer, A Future, 32–​ 32, 44–​45. 31. Anthony Raven Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Constable and Robinson, 2013). 32. For the summary of the arguments against pure worker’s self-​ management see Roemer, A Future. See also Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 238–​242. 33. Post WW II German experiments with Mitbestimmung were early and incomplete forms of such institutionalization. 34. Roemer, A Future, chap. 6 and 8.

Notes  275 35. We think it is a mistake to qualify as neo-​liberal privatization in terms of a pluralistic system of property, and in particular the idea of citizen and worker shares. See Appel and Orenstein, Triumph to Crisis. For the fate of different schemes of property transformation in Central Europe see David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt, Postsocialist Pathways: Transforming Politics and Property in East Central Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); For the origin of various types of market socialism in modern economic theory see the somewhat doubtful genealogy of Brockman, Markets. 36. Jean L. Cohen, “Populism and the Politics of Resentment,” Jus Cogens 1 (2019): 5–​39, doi:10.2139/​ssrn.3243548. 37. On intersectionality see Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (New York: The New Press, 2017); a conception that has been radically distorted and caricatured since. 38. See Colin Crouch, The Globalization Backlash (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018), 61ff. 39. Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—​and Beyond,” American Affairs 1, no. 4 (2017): 46–​64, https://​americanaffairsjournal.org/​2017/​11/​progressive-​ neoliberalism-​trump-​beyond/​; Nancy Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent Magazine, 2017, https://​www.dissentmagazine.org/​online_​articles/​ progressive-​neoliberalism-​reactionary-​populism-​nancy-​fraser. 40. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2005). Note Mouffe’s elision of the distinction between economic and political liberalism. Also see Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99 Percent (London: Verso Publishing, 2019), where they embrace left populism and target liberalism and cultural politics as part of the cause of the rise of right-​wing populism. For a critique see Johanna Brenner, “There Was No Such Thing as ‘Progressive Neoliberalism,’ ” Dissent Magazine, 2017, https://​www.dissentmagazine.org/​online_​articles/​nancy-​fraser-​ progressive-​neoliberalism-​social-​movements-​response, criticizing the undercurrent of blame of the new social movements for both neo-​liberalism and the rise of authoritarian populism. 41. Crouch, Globalization Backlash, 73–​75. 42. Cohen, “Politics of Resentment,” 33–​49. 43. Ibid., 27–​36. 44. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). 45. Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty—​Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 80–​158. 46. Ibid. 47. Crouch, Globalization Backlash, 80–​83;107–​109. 48. Crouch, Post-​Democracy, chap. 5 and 6. 49. Compare Crouch, Post-​Democracy, 15ff with 116ff and 122ff. In the end, Crouch goes so far as to support the disruptive tactics of new movements, a choice we ourselves would be more cautious about. For us, non-​violence (that may be compatible with some but certainly not all forms of “disruption”) is the key to the moral influence of movements.

276 Notes 50. Wolfgang Kraushaar and Johannes Agnoli, Was Sollen Die Grünen Im Parlament? (Frankfurt am Main: Neue Kritik, 1983). 51. Crouch, Post-​Democracy, 120. 52. That there are important similarities however has been demonstrated by Greskovits in another context. See Béla Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience (Budapest: Central European University Press, 1998), 106.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abrams, Stacey, 198, 217–​18 Ackerman, Bruce, 158 ADE (electoral coalition in Ecuador), 161–​62 affective polarization democratic political party systems harmed by, 99–​100 friend-​enemy dynamics of populism and, 19–​20, 93–​100 politics of resentment and, 96–​98 populist parties’ normalization and abandonment of, 78 populists in government and the embrace of, 127–​28 social identity and, 95–​96, 99 strategic incitement of, 96–​97 AKP (governing party in Turkey), 170–​71 Americans for Prosperity, 81–​82 anti-​establishment discourse anti-​party parties and, 60–​61, 100–​2 as definitional element of populism, 53–​ 54, 89–​90 economic populism and, 18–​19 movement parties and, 19–​20, 67–​68, 81, 105 populist parties in government and, 61–​ 62, 101 social movements and, 54–​55, 60–​61 anti-​party parties anti-​establishment discourse and, 60–​ 61, 100–​2 digital platform parties and, 79 factionalization and, 91–​92 friend-​enemy dynamics and, 94–​95 hollowed out existing party structures and, 55, 62 pars pro toto logic and, 92–​93 apex courts abusive constitutionalism and, 155, 180–​81 constitutional amendment review and, 175 court packing and, 21–​22 dictatorships and, 150–​51 “legal revolutions” and, 9–​10 populist hybrid regimes’ attack of, 137–​ 38, 150

populists in government and attacks on, 125–​26 APRA (political party in Peru), 35, 45 Arato, Andrew, 60–​61 Arendt, Hannah, 29, 175–​76 Argentina bait-​and-​switch populism in, 41–​43 constitution in, 155–​56 Italian fascism compared to populism in, 25 neo-​liberalism in, 35–​36 Peron and Peronism in, 9–​10, 11–​12, 35, 41–​ 42, 45, 146–​47, 182 political party bans in, 146 shift from liberal populism to national populism in, 35 Aristotle, 197 Austria, 44–​46, 159 authoritarianism. See also competitive authoritarianism executive power under, 146–​47 fascism and, 25, 146–​47 ideology and, 146–​47 illiberal democracy and transitions from, 140–​41 Linz’s analysis of, 131–​33, 140–​41, 146–​47, 148–​49, 150–​51 military bureaucratic authoritarian regimes and, 42–​43 mobilization under, 146–​47, 148–​49 normalization of political parties with a history of, 70 pluralism restricted in, 146–​47 populism’s affinity with, ix, 1–​2, 3, 14, 16–​17, 20, 25, 56, 107–​8, 134–​35 populists as the government and, 108–​9 transitions to dictatorships from, 150–​51 bait and switch strategies austerity programs and, 166 cartel party systems and, 40–​42 delegative democracy and, 37–​38 economic populism and, 45 globalization and, 42

296 Index bait and switch strategies (cont.) populist parties’ normalization in power and, 28, 36, 48–​49 supply-​demand dynamics of populism and, 18–​19, 53, 74–​75 third road approaches and, 40–​41 Balbo, Laura, 46 Barco, Virgilio, 162 Bellamy, Richard, 175–​76, 181 Berlusconi, Silvio, 46, 49–​50, 78–​79, 91–​92, 94–​95, 160 Biden, Joe, vii–​ix, 84–​85, 202 Black Lives Matter movement, 198 Blair, Tony, 41–​42 Blokker, Paul, 160, 179, 181–​82 Bobbio, Norberto, 91–​92 Bodin, Jean, 29–​30 Bolivarian Circles (Venezuela), 70, 73 Bolivia Cocaleros in, 74–​75, 163–​64 constituent assembly in, 163–​64 constitution in, 38–​39, 76, 136, 155–​56, 160–​61, 163–​65, 175, 182 indigenous rights movement in, 75 mobilization from below approach to populism in, 74–​75 plebiscitary approach to populism in, 45, 75–​76 presidential system in, 75–​76 presidential term limits in, 180–​81 Bossi, Umberto, 94–​95 Brazil, 35, 42–​43, 155–​56, 182 Brewer-​Carias, Allan-​Randolph, 174 Brexit vote (United Kingdom, 2016), 45–​46, 262n.10 British National Party (BNP), 70 Cambio 90 (political party in Peru), 166 Canovan, Margaret, 3, 5, 121–​22 Cardenas, Lazaro, 35 Carré de Malberg, Raymond, 187–​88 cartel parties, 34–​35, 40–​44, 65–​68 Casa Pound, 70 catch-​all parties cartel parties compared to, 65–​66 chains of equivalence created by, 55, 101–​2, 190–​91 elections and, 101–​2 hollowing out of party structures and, 55, 88 host ideologies and, 94–​95 limitations of, 217–​18 mass parties compared to, 64–​65

chains of equivalence catch-​all parties’ creation of, 55, 101–​2, 190–​91 as definitional element of populism, 5, 11–​12, 186–​87 pars pro toto logic and, 92, 98 “the people” as empty signifier in, 13, 50–​51, 98 positive characteristics of democratic politics and, 23–​24 solidarity established through, 210 thin ideologies and, 11–​12 charismatic leaders constitutionalism and, 183–​84 as definitional element of populism, 5–​8, 12–​13, 53–​54, 153, 186–​87 elections and, 127–​28 as embodiment of “the people,” 13, 109, 122, 134–​35, 190–​91, 193 friend-​enemy dynamics and, 193–​94 horizontal accountability weakened by, 126 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 10–​11 positive characteristics of democratic politics and, 23–​24 presidential systems and, 14–​15 supply-​demand explanation of populism and, 40 Chavez, Hugo constitution of Venezuela and, 73–​74, 162–​63 elections manipulated by, 128–​29 lack of experience in elected office of, 134–​35 Laclau and, 7–​8 “legal revolution” and, 9–​10 media and, 51, 129–​30 mobilization dimension of populism and, 14–​15, 73–​74 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 73–​74 socialism as host ideology for, 95 Supreme Court of Venezuela, 173–​74, 180–​81 Chile, 38, 42–​43, 159 Christian right (United States), 82–​83, 84–​85 Cicero, 197 Civic Circles (Hungary), 70–​72 civil rights movement (United States), viii, 61, 87–​88 clientelism, 1–​2, 41, 56, 73–​74, 137 Clinton, Bill, 41–​42 Cocaleros (coca growers’ association, Bolivia), 74–​75, 163–​64 Cohen, Jean, 60–​61 Colombia, 155–​56, 160–​62, 164–​65, 170, 175 Colon-​Rios, Joel, 155 communism, 9–​12, 45, 59

Index  297 competitive authoritarianism critiques of the concept of, 21, 145–​46 delegative democracy and, 112 elections and, 11, 112, 132–​33, 146–47 hybrid nature of, 131–​32, 133 legislatures and, 146–47 media under, 146–47 pluralism and, 132–​33 populist hybrid regime compared to, 134–​35 stability of, 131–​32 consensus democracy, 168, 200–​1 constituent power constituted power differentiated from, 5, 13, 32, 73, 137–​38, 153–​54, 176–​77, 180–​81, 183–​84, 195 constitutionalism and, 31, 154–​55, 176–​77, 183–​84, 195, 196 as definitional element of populism, 5–​7, 13 disinterest in ordinary policy and, 5, 13 positive characteristics of democratic politics and, 6, 23–​24 constitutionalism abusive constitutionalism and, 154–​55, 179–​82 apex courts and, 177 charismatic leaders and, 183–​84 communism and, 9 constituent power and, 31, 154–​55, 176–​77, 183–​84, 195, 196 constitutional amendment process and, 155, 170–​71, 200–​1 constitutional instrumentalism and, 179 democratic constitutionalism and, 118, 150, 175–​76, 195 eternity clauses and, 176–​77 executives’ role in constitutional replacement and, 165–​69 facade constitutions and, 177, 180 fascism and, 9 inherited constitutionalism and, 178 nominal constitutions and, 177, 180 plebiscitary element of populism and, 169, 180 popular constitutionalism and, 156–​60, 183, 189–​90, 195, 196 popular sovereignty and, 9, 17–​18, 22–​23, 27, 29–​32, 111–​12, 153–​54, 156–​75, 178–​79 populist constitutionalism and, 175–​84 populist constitutional replacement and, 160–​65, 167 populists as the government and, 20–​23, 108–​9, 131 presidential systems and, 37–​38 rule of law constitutionalism and, 177–​78

separation of powers and, 176–​77 weak constitutionalism and, 195 written constitutions and, 176–​77 Correa, Rafael, 51, 134–​35, 163–​64 Corrias, Luigi, 183–​84 Coughlin, Father, 50–​51 counter-​democracy, 31, 119–​21, 130, 187–​88, 217 court packing apex courts and, 21–​22 in Hungary, 15–​16, 135–​36, 167–​68 in Poland, 15–​16, 135–​36, 171–​72 in Turkey, 15–​16, 170–​71 in Venezuela, 173–​74, 180–​81 Crouch, Colin, 189–​90, 214 Csurka, István, 158–​59 cultural deficits, ix, 17, 27, 189–​90, 201, 202–​3, 216–​17 Dahl, Robert, 56–​57, 61–​62, 112–​13, 116, 121–​ 22, 187–​88, 194 de Gaulle, Charles, 159–​60 De La Torre, Carlos, 32, 34–​35, 38–​39, 73–​74, 76, 161–​62 delegative democracy bait and switch strategies, 37–​38 competitive authoritarianism and, 112 executive authority in, 133 illiberal democracy and, 140 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 37 populists’ exploiting of weaknesses of, 38–​39 populists in government and, 126, 133 vertical accountability and, 37–​38 della Porta, Donatella, 76–​78 democracy civil liberties and, 117, 118–​19, 132–​33 consensus democracy and, 168, 200–​1 counter-​democracy and, 31, 119–​21, 130, 187–​88, 217 democratization of, 1, 30–​31, 216 elections and, 30–​31, 116–​17, 132–​33 federalism and, 188–​89 forbearance and, 117–​18, 124–​25 freedom and, 111–​12, 116–​17, 128 liberalism’s potential tension with, 111–​12, 144 mutual toleration and, 117–​18, 124–​25 pluralism and, 90, 119, 128, 188, 191, 197, 215–​16 political equality and, 111–​13, 116, 121–​22, 139–​40, 182 polyarchy and, 121–​22 popular sovereignty and, 29, 110–​11, 121, 139–​40

298 Index democracy (cont.) populism as response to political contradictions of, 17, 27, 29–​31 populists in government and, 20, 122–​30 reflexivity of, 121–​22 rule of law and, 117, 118, 127, 132–​33 self-​limitation principle and, 119, 121, 129–​30 separation of powers and, 118, 197–​98 trust and, 119 democratic deficits democratization as means of addressing, 185–​86, 190 executive power and, 182 illiberal democracy viewed as means of addressing, 142 as inherent structural element of democracy, 110–​11 mobilization and, 28 populism as response to, 32, 134–​35, 178–​79 Democratic Party (United States), 83, 86–​ 88, 216 democratization democratic deficits addressed through, 185–​86, 190 democratization of democracy and, 1, 30–​31, 216 Eastern Europe and, viii–​ix, 112 of political parties, 66–​67, 88 Schmitt on, 140 third wave (1970-​2000) of, 112 Denmark, 43 Diamond, Larry, 131–​32 dictatorship, 21, 108, 109, 150–​51 digital platform parties, 78–​81, 101–​2, 104–​5 discriminatory legalism, 21–​22, 127, 129–​30 Dixon, Rosalind, 154–​55, 172, 174, 179–​81 Duda, Andrzej, 171–​72 Duverger, Maurice, 63–​64, 67–​68 Ecuador constituent assembly in, 15–​16, 164 constitution in, 38–​39, 155–​56, 160–​62, 163, 164–​65, 170, 175, 182 neo-​liberalism in, 35–​36 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 45 presidential system in, 14–​15 separation of powers in, 135–​36 Supreme Court and, 175 elections communism and, 9–​10, 11–​12 competitive authoritarianism and, 11, 112, 132–​33, 146–47

as definitional element of populism, 8–​12, 13 democracy and, 30–​31, 116–​17, 132–​33 fascism and, 9–​10, 11–​12 gerrymandering and, 83, 127–​29 populist hybrid regimes and, 136–​37, 148–​50 populist leaders’ manipulation of, 11, 21 populist regimes’ preservation of, 15–​16, 109 populists as the government and, 108–​ 9, 130–​31 populists in government and, 122–​23, 127–​ 29, 130–​31 English Defense League (EDL), 70 Erdogan, Recep Tayyip, viii–​ix, 84–​85, 128–​29, 160, 197–​98 Estonia, 146 extreme polarized pluralism, 93–​95 5 Star Movement (M5S, Italy), 46, 74–​75, 76–​77, 78–​81, 101–​2 fascism authoritarianism and, 25, 146–​47 constitutionalism and, 9 counter-​mobilization and, 25 elections and, 9–​10, 11–​12 extreme violence and, 9–​10 movement parties and, 59 populism and, 7–​10, 11–​12, 25, 45–​46 as “thick ideology,” 11–​12 federalism, 123, 176–​77, 180–​81, 188–​89, 212–​ 14, 217–​18 FIDESZ Party (Hungary) as catch-​all party, 70–​71 Civic Circles and, 70–​72 elections and, 70–​71, 128–​29, 159, 167 hierarchical organization of, 168 mobilization dimension of populism and, 14–​15, 72 origins of, 70 Finchelstein, Federico, 9–​10 Forza Italia party, 91–​92, 94–​95 Fournier, Theo, 159–​60 Fox News, 49, 81–​84 Fraenkel, Ernst, 108 France anti-​immigrant versus anti-​elite populism in, 14 constitution in, 159–​60 French Revolution and, 25, 157–​58, 183–​84 Front National (FN) in, 9, 14–​15, 43, 159–​61 Franco, Francisco, 146–​47 Frankenberg, Günter, 181–​82 Fraser, Nancy, 209–​10 Freedom Works, 81–​82

Index  299 friend-​enemy dynamics affective polarization and, 19–​20, 93–​100 anti-​party parties and, 94–​95 charismatic leaders and, 193–​94 civic standing of individuals undermined by, 99 as definitional element of populism, 5–​7, 13, 16–​17, 53–​54, 89–​90, 153, 186–​87 host ideologies and, 12 left populism versus right populism and, 14 normalization of populist parties and abandonment of, 78 oversimplification in, 104 pars pro toto logic and, 98 populist hybrid regimes and, 149–​50 populists in government and, 61–​62, 127–​28 status loss and, 47–​48 Front National (FN, France), 9, 14–​15, 43, 159–​61 Fujimori, Alberto, 9–​10, 14, 41–​42, 48–​49, 134–​ 35, 166–​67 Furet, Francois, 29, 187–​88 Gandhi, Indira, 11, 197–​98 Garcia, Alan, 45 Gaviria, César, 162 Gerbaudo, Paolo, 79–​81, 104–​5 Germani, Gino, 25–​28, 34–​35, 39, 41 Germany, 45–​46, 105–​6, 206–​7 gerrymandering, 83, 127–​29 Gingrich, Newt, 83 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 211–​12 Ginsburg, Tom, 118, 128–​30, 136–​37 globalization, 1–​2, 42, 209, 211. See also neo-​liberalism Goldfrank, Benjamin, 73 Greece, 45, 74–​75, 76–​77, 105–​6 Green parties, viii, 43–​44, 60–​61, 101–​2, 215 Greskovits, Béla, 71 Grillo, Beppe, 46, 78–​79 Guatemala, 146 Gutiérrez, Lucio, 134–​35 Habermas, Jürgen, 57–​58, 121–​22, 144–​45, 187–​88, 192–​93, 217 Haider, Jörg, 45–​46 Halmai, Gábor, 154–​55, 181–​82 Hawkins, Kirk Andrew, 247n.202 Hitler, Adolf, 9–​10 horizontal accountability, 37–​38, 75–​76, 125–​ 26, 134–​35 host ideologies as definitional element of populism, 8, 11–​13

economic populism and, 35 friend-​enemy dynamics and, 12 left populism versus right populism and, 14 liberal democracy and, 12, 78 mobilization in populism and, 28 nationalism and, 12–​13, 98–​99, 149–​50 nativism and, 47–​48 neo-​liberalism and, 12–​13, 35–​36 populists’ ability to float between, 11–​13, 14 religion and, 12–​13, 47–​48 socialism and, 12–​13, 95, 98–​99, 149–​50 human rights, 78, 116, 141–​42, 143, 175 Hungarian Socialists, 71 Hungary Basic Law in, 159, 168, 173 Civic Circles in, 70–​71 constituent assembly in, 15–​16 Constitutional Court and, 167–​68 constitution in, 38–​39, 136, 155–​56, 159, 165, 167–​69, 170–​72, 173, 175, 184 corruption in, 149–​50 court packing in, 15–​16, 135–​36, 167–​68 elections in, 70–​71, 128–​29, 159 media in, 129–​30 parliament in, 123, 197–​98 revolution (1956) in, 70–​71 Round Table negotiations (1989), 159 separation of powers in, 135–​36 Huq, Aziz, 118, 128–​30, 136–​37 ideal typical construction of populism, 3, 4, 7–​13 Iglesias, Pablo, 51, 77–​78 illiberal democracy critiques of the concept of, 21, 139–​45 delegative democracy and, 140 elections and, 141 Orban and, 138–​39, 142–​43, 145 rule of law subverted in, 145 transitions from authoritarianism and, 140–​41 viewed as means of addressing democratic deficits, 142 immanent critique of populism, 2–​3, 4–​7 import substitution industrialization (ISI), 33–​34, 35–​36 India, viii–​ix, 11, 123–​24, 170, 197–​98 Indignados movement (Spain), 74–​75, 77 Indivisible movement, 198 Inglehart, Ronald, 28 inherited constitutionalism, 178 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, Mexico), 41–​42, 45

300 Index Iran, 146 Italy, 25, 45–​46, 105–​6, 146–​47 Jansen, Robert, 69 Jobbik Party (Hungary), 70–​72 Johnson, Lyndon B., 87–​88 Kaczyński, Jarosław, 84–​85, 142–​43, 197–​98 Kaczyński, Lech, 171–​72 Katz, Richard S., 65–​66, 68, 80 Keane, John, 214 Kelsen, Hans, 92–​93, 116–​17, 121–​22 Keynesianism, 144, 207 Kirchheimer, Otto, 64–​65 Kirchner, Cristina and Néstor, 7–​8 Kitschelt, Herbert, 47–​48, 67–​68, 72, 85–​ 86, 100–​2 Kramer, Larry D., 181 Laclau, Ernesto chains of equivalence in discourse and, 50–​ 51, 55, 98 on constitutionalism and constituent power, 154–​55 on democracy and equality, 139–​40 dimensions of populism and, 5–​6, 7–​8, 12–​13 disinterest in ordinary politics of, 5–​6 elections and, 11 immanent critique of, 2 leaders advised by, 7–​8 populism affirmed as radical democratic alternative by, 3 populism’s floating between host ideologies and, 14 replacement of liberal democracy advocated by, 1 symbolic representation and, 9 Landau, David, 154–​55, 172, 174, 179–​81, 184 Latvia, 146 Law and Justice Party (PiS, Poland), 159, 171–​ 72, 179 Lefort, Claude on democracy and rights, 116 democracy viewed as empty space of power by, 137–​38, 144–​45, 187–​88, 192, 194 on popular sovereignty, 29, 121 regime defined by, 115–​16 Lega Norde (Italy), 46, 70, 94–​95 Lenin, Vladimir, 69, 216 Le Pen, Jean, 45–​46 Le Pen, Marine, 11–​12, 45–​46, 159–​60 Levitsky, Steven, 117–​18, 133, 134–​35, 141–​42, 146–​47

liberal democracy globalization as threat to, 1–​2 as host ideology, 12, 78 oligarchic tendencies of representative systems as threat to, 1–​2 populists as the government and the rejection of, 111 unfinished nature of, 1 liberalism constitutionalism and, 139–​40 democracy’s potential tension with, 111–​ 12, 144 economic liberalism and, 144 individual rights and, 139–​40, 143 rule of law and, 139–​40 separation of powers and, 139–​40 social rights and, 144–​45 universal suffrage and, 139–​40, 144–​45 Lijphart, Arend, 200–​1 Linz, Juan on attempts to replace liberal democracy, 110–​11 authoritarian regimes analyzed by, 131–​33, 140–​41, 146–​47, 148–​49, 150–​51 on mentalites, 149–​50 presidentialism critiqued by, 37, 124, 197–​98 Loewenstein, Karl, 177 Long, Huey, 50–​51 López Maya, Margarita, 73 Loxton, James, 134–​35 Luxemburg, Rosa, 69 Lynch, Nicholas, 166–​67 M200 coalition (Venezuela), 162 Madrid, Raúl, 73, 75, 164–​65 Maduro, Nicolas, 21, 173–​74, 180–​81 Mair, Peter, 65–​66, 68, 80 majoritarianism, 10–​11, 37–​38, 90–​91, 92–​93, 125–​26, 128, 200 Mandela, Nelson, 193 Manichean worldview in populism, 53–​54, 89–​ 90, 92–​93, 98–​99, 186–​87, 193–​94 Manin, Bernard, 9, 30 Mao Zedong, 9–​10 Marsdal, Magnus, 43–​44 Marx, Karl, 3, 27, 124, 174, 191–​92, 197–​98 MAS Party (Bolivia), 74–​77, 122–​23, 163–​64 mass parties, 63–​65 MBR200 Party (Venezuela), 70 McAdam, Doug, 61 McCoy, Jennifer, 97–​98 McIlwain, C.H., 175–​76

Index  301 media competitive authoritarianism and, 146–47 decentralized internet-​based media and, 50–​51 “fake news” line of criticism against, 18–​19, 49–​51, 84, 99–​100 “megaphone” and “cheerleader” roles of, 49 mobilization dimension of populism and, 28, 48–​49 monopolies in, 199–​200 partisan media outlets and, 49 populist hybrid regimes and, 129–​31 spectacularization logic in, 51–​52 Tea Party (United States) and, 49–​51, 71, 81–​82 Melucci, Alberto, 57–​58, 60–​61, 81 Menem, Carlos, 41–​42 Mény, Yves, 157–​59, 178–​79 Mexico, 41–​42, 45 Meyer, David S., 88 Michels, Robert, 86–​88 mobilization authoritarian regimes and, 146–​47, 148–​49 chief executives’ roles in, 73–​74 counter-​mobilization and, 25, 28, 119 as definitional element of populism, 5–​8, 13, 16–​17, 68–​69 definitions of, 69 media strategies and, 28, 48–​49 mobilization from above and, 14–​15, 37–​38, 46–​47, 55, 68–​69, 72–​74, 122–​23, 147–​49 mobilization from below and, 14–​16, 46–​47, 55, 68–​69, 74–​85, 217–​18 movement parties and, 104–​5 polarization and, 199 political crises and, 34 political parties and, 14–​16, 55, 70–​72 populist hybrid regimes and, 147–​49 presidential systems and, 14–​15 thick ideologies and, 11–​12 Modi, Narendra, 84–​85 Moffitt, Benjamin, 39, 49–​50, 51 Morales, Evo, 74–​76, 163–​64, 175 Morgan, Edmund, 29, 121–​22, 187–​88 Mouffe, Chantal, 3, 11–​12, 139–​40, 142–​44, 156–​57, 190, 194 movement parties alliances with social movements and, 86–​88 anti-​establishment discourse and, 19–​20, 67–​68, 81, 105 communism and, 59 digital platform parties and, 78–​81, 101–​ 2, 104–​5

fascism and, 59 hybrid nature of, 85–​86 membership rules and, 79–​80 mobilization and, 104–​5 normalization process among, 55–​56 organizing principles of, 16–​17, 85, 104–​5 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 79–​81 polarization and, 61 social movement methods and, 55–​56 Movimiento Alianza Pais (MPAIS), 164 Mudde, Cas, 7, 11–​12, 153–​54 Müller, Jan-​Werner, 154–​55 Mussolini, Benito, 9–​10, 50–​51, 146–​48 nationalism counter-​populist efforts to reclaim, 212–​13 empty signifiers in, 12–​13 federalism as a response to, 213 as host ideology, 12–​13, 98–​99, 149–​50 patriotism and, 23–​24 solidarity and, 27 white nationalism, viii–​ix neo-​liberalism crises of austerity politics and, 164–​65 as host ideology, 12–​13, 35–​36 individualism and, 144 in Peru, 14, 35–​36, 166–​67 precariat’s response to, 41 race to the bottom and, 205 right-​wing populism and, 36 social rights and, 36, 41–​42, 181–​82 social solidarity decreased under, 106 third way strategies and, 44 Washington Consenus and, 41–​42 welfare deficits and, 201–​3 Nepal, 146 The Netherlands, 46 Nicaragua, 175 Nixon, Richard, 61, 87–​88 Norris, Pippa, 28 Norway, 43 Obama, Barack, 42–​43, 83 O’Donell, Guillermo, 37–​38, 126, 133, 140–​ 41, 193 Offe, Claus, 58–​59, 60–​61 Open Society, 72 Orbán, Viktor anti-​establishment discourse of, 72 Civic Circles and, 70–​72 constitution of Hungary and, 173 elections manipulated by, 128–​29 illiberal democracy and, 138–​39, 142–​43, 145

302 Index Orbán, Viktor (cont.) “legal revolution” and, 9–​10 media attacked by, 129–​30 nationalism and, 160 Round Table negotiations (1989) and, 159 Organization of American States (OAS), 164–​66 Pacto de Unidad (Bolivia), 74–​75 Paine, Thomas, 29 Pakistan, 146 pars pro toto logic anti-​party parties and, 92–​93 chains of equivalence and, 92, 98 as definitional element of populism, 13, 53–​54, 89–​90, 153, 186–​87 democratic holism and, 92–​93 friend-​enemy dynamic of populism and, 98 shadow holism and, 90–​91, 92–​93 “true people” concept and, 89 parties of notables, 63 Pelinka, Anton, 44 the people charismatic leaders as embodiment of, 13, 109, 122, 134–​35, 190–​91, 193 as empty signifier in populism, 5, 12–​13, 175 populism’s Manichean framing of, 53–​54, 70–​71 populism’s stress on the unity of, 16–​17, 128, 153 positive characteristics of democratic politics and, 6 Peron, Juan, 9–​10, 11–​12, 35, 182 Peronism, 9, 41–​42, 45, 146–​47 Peru bait-​and-​switch populism in, 41–​42, 48–​49 constitution in, 155–​56, 165–​66, 168–​69, 170, 180 coup (1992) in, 166 neo-​liberalism in, 14, 35–​36, 166–​67 presidential system in, 14–​15 separation of powers in, 135–​36 Pitkin, Hanna, 9, 190–​91 Pizzorno, Alessandro, 57–​58 plebiscitary approach to populism Bolivia and, 45, 75–​76 charismatic leaders’ consolidation of power via, 10–​11 constitutionalism and, 169, 180 delegative democracy and, 37 majoritarianism and, 10–​11 movement parties and, 104–​5 populist hybrid regimes and, 136–​37

presidential systems and, 11 Venezuela and, 45, 73–​74 pluralism authoritarianism’s restrictions on, 146–​47 competitive authoritarianism and, 132–​33 democracy and, 90, 119, 128, 188, 191, 197, 215–​16 dictatorship’s suppression of, 150–​51 extreme polarized pluralism and, 93–​95 identity and, 215–​16 populist regimes’ rejection of, 128 social movements and, 57–​58 Podemos Party (Spain), 74–​75, 76–​78 Poland Constitutional Tribunal in, 171–​72, 179 constitution in, 155–​56, 159, 175, 180–​81 court packing in, 15–​16, 135–​36, 171–​72 parliament in, 123, 197–​98 populist regime in, viii–​ix separation of powers in, 135–​36 Polányi, Karl, 58 polarization. See also affective polarization extreme polarized pluralism and, 93–​95 mobilization and, 199 political crises and, 34 populist leaders and, 56 progressive responses to, 211–​12 political parties bans against, 146 cartel parties and, 34–​35, 40–​44, 65–​68 channeling functions of, 102–​4 democratization of, 66–​67, 88 governing functions of, 103–​4 hollowing out of the structures of, 55, 62, 65–​67 mass parties, 63–​65 mobilization dimension of populism and, 14–​16, 55, 70–​72 parties of notables and, 63 political party systems and, 34–​35, 36, 53–​56, 89–​106 recruiting functions of, 103 re-​factionalization of, 19–​20, 56, 89–​90, 91 social movements distinguished from, 54, 58–​59 social movements’ engagement with, 60, 76–​77 polyarchy, 121–​22, 187–​88, 191–​92, 194 popular sovereignty abstract nature of, 121 constitutionalism and, 9, 17–​18, 22–​23, 27, 29–​32, 111–​12, 153–​54, 156–​75, 178–​79 counter-​democracy and, 120–​21

Index  303 as definitional element of populism, 5–​9, 13, 186–​87 democracy and, 29, 110–​11, 121, 139–​40 plebiscites and, 10–​11 positive characteristics of democratic politics and, 6, 23–​24 representative government and, 30–​31 social rights and, 187–​88 universal suffrage and, 29 populist hybrid regimes administrative bureaucracies attacked by, 137 apex courts attacked by, 137–​38, 150 classification debates regarding, 138–​52 competitive authoritarianism compared to, 134–​35 corruption and, 149–​50 dictatorships as potential outcome of, 108, 109 elections under, 136–​37, 148–​50 friend-​enemy dynamics and, 149–​50 judiciary branch and, 136–​37 mobilization under, 147–​49 mutual toleration norms and, 136–​37 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 136–​37 potential instability of, 108 rule of law and, 136–​37, 150 threshold to establishing, 136–​37 populists as the government authoritarianism and, 108–​9 constitutionalism and, 20–​23, 108–​9, 131 definition of, 109–​10 elections manipulated by, 108–​9, 130–​31 hybrid nature of regimes created by, 20, 107–​ 8, 123, 131 judiciary branch and, 123–​24 liberal democracy rejected by, 111 media targeted by, 130–​31 separation of powers negated by, 108–​ 9, 130–​31 threshold of transition to, 133 populists in government affective political polarization embraced by, 127–​28 anti-​establishment discourse, 61–​62, 101 civil society attacked by, 129–​30 counter-​democracy and, 130 definition of, 109–​10 delegative democracy and, 126, 133 democracy and, 20, 122–​30 elections manipulated by, 122–​23, 127–​ 29, 130–​31 friend-​enemy dynamics and, 61–​62, 127–​28

horizontal accountability attacked by, 125–​26 media targeted by, 129–​31 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 126 pluralism rejected by, 129–​30 presidential systems and, 124 self-​limitation principle rejected by, 129–​30 separation of powers and, 23–​24, 124–​ 26, 130–​31 Postero, Nancy, 163–​64 the precariat, 33–​36, 41, 166 privatization, 76, 91–​92, 207 Pro Köln (Germany), 70 proportional representation systems, 60, 159–​60 Putin, Vladimir, 21 Putnam, Robert, 214 Rawls, John, 121–​22, 189–​90, 217 Renzi, Matto, 160 Republican Party (United States), viii–​ix, 60, 81–​85, 87–​88, 190. See also Tea Party (United States) Roberts, Kenneth, 7–​8, 34–​36, 42–​44 Rodrik, Dani, 28, 33–​34 Roemer, John, 208 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 193 Rosanvallon, Pierre, 31, 119–​20, 130, 187–​88 Rosenblum, Nancy, 90–​91 Rostboll, Christian, 99 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 30 Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, 7, 40 rule of law defining characteristics of, 118 democracy and, 117, 118, 127, 132–​33 discriminatory legalism as threat to, 127 hybrid regimes and, 108 populists’ willingness to eviscerate, 89–​90, 150 rule of law constitutionalism and, 177–​78 Russia, viii–​ix, 21, 25, 108, 219 Ruzza, Carlos, 46 Rzeplinski, Andrzej, 171–​72 Sadurski, Wojciech, 171–​72, 179 Salvini, Matteo, 46 San Martin, José de, 193 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 46 Sartori, Giovanni on anti-​party parties, 93 on extreme polarized pluralism, 93–​94, 99–​100 minimalist definition of democracy of, 112–​13 on re-​factionalization of political parties, 89–​90, 91

304 Index Schattschneider, E.E., 62 Schedler, Andreas, 132–​33, 138–​39, 141–​42 Schlozman, Daniel, 60–​61 Schmitt, Carl, 5, 139–​40, 142–​45, 181–​84, 194 Schumpeter, Joseph, 112–​13 self-​limitation principle, 7–​8, 106, 119, 121, 129–​30, 214–​15 separation of powers constitutionalism and, 176–​77 democracy and, 118, 197–​98 horizontal accountability and, 37–​38 populism in government and, 23–​24 populists as the government and the negation of, 108–​9, 130–​31 populists in government and, 23–​24, 124–​26, 130–​31 presidential systems and, 37, 135–​36 Sieyès, Emmanuel, 29 Skocpol, Theda, 49–​50, 81–​83 socialism authoritarian socialism and, 12, 203, 205–​6 forms of property ownership and, 208 as host ideology, 12–​13, 95, 98–​99, 149–​50 need for market competition in reformed forms of, 205–​8 neo-​socialist populism and, 37, 43 social democracy and, 23–​24, 203–​4, 211 state direction of the economy and, 205–​6 vanguards of class consciousness and, 69 social movements anti-​establishment discourse and, 54–​55, 60–​61 collective behavior school and, 59 contentious politics and, 57–​58 Eastern Europe and, viii fundamental goals of, 56–​57 movement parties’ alliances with, 86–​88 movements from above and, 16–​17 oppositional nature of, 15–​16 organizational structure of, 58 pluralism and, 57–​58 political parties distinguished from, 54, 58–​59 political parties’ engagement with, 60, 76–​77 politics of influence and, 58 social rights costly nature of, 205 Latin America and, 34–​35 liberalism and, 144–​45 neo-​liberalism and, 36, 41–​42, 181–​82 popular sovereignty and, 187–​88 populism as a response to absence of, 27 representative government and, 30–​31 unionization and, 204

solidarity allegiance to multiple identities and, 214 antiracism and, 212 chains of equivalence and, 210 inclusive politics of, 48, 210 local communities as source of, 213 nationalism and, 27 neo-​liberalism and, 106 populism as means of addressing deficits in, 28, 32–​33, 34 pro-​family policies and, 211–​12 status loss addressed through, 48 Solidarity (trade union in Poland), 70–​ 71, 158–​59 Somer, Murat, 97–​98 Soros, George, 72 South Africa, 137–​38, 159, 196–​97, 219–​20 Soviet Union, viii–​ix, 112 Spain, 45, 69, 74–​75, 77, 105–​6, 219–​20 status loss cultural deficits and, 201–​2 economic approaches to remedying, 209–​10 educational responses to, 211–​12 friend-​enemy dynamics and, 47–​48 globalization and, 209, 211 leftist counter-​politics of victimhood and, 209 populism as means of addressing, 26–​27 solidarity as means of addressing, 48 white working class in United States and, 32–​33 Strache, Hans-​Christian, 45–​46 Surel, Yves, 157–​59, 178–​79 Syriza Party (Greece), 74–​75, 76–​77, 105–​6 Tarrow, Sydney, 88 taxation, 36, 42, 50–​51, 82–​83, 205, 217 Taylor, Charles, 112–​13 Tea Party (United States) “Astroturf ” mobilization and, 81–​82, 88 internal conflicts in, 48–​49, 82–​84 media strategies of, 49–​51, 71, 81–​82 Republican Party taken over by, 81–​84, 88, 122–​23 Trump and, 83 third road strategies, 40–​41, 44 Tilly, Charles, 46–​47, 57–​58, 68–​69 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 115–​16, 124, 197–​98 Touraine, Alain, 46–​47, 57–​58, 60–​61, 68–​69 Tronconi, Filippo, 94–​95 Trump, Donald bait-​and-​switch populism and, 48–​49 as charismatic leader, 83–​84, 193–​94

Index  305 elections and, vii, 128–​29, 185 friend-​enemy dynamics of populism and, 84 media and, 49–​50, 84, 129–​30 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 84 propaganda techniques utilized by, viii–​ix Republican Party taken over by, 81–​85, 88 Tea Party and, 83–​85 US Capitol riot (2021) and, vii white nationalism and, viii–​ix, 83 white working class voters and, 44 Turkey constituent assembly in, 15–​16 constitution in, 155–​56, 159, 170–​71, 175, 180 court packing in, 15–​16, 170–​71 manipulation of elections in, 128–​29 media in, 129–​30 military governments in, 159 parliament in, 123, 197–​98 political party bans in, 146 populist regime in, viii–​ix presidential system in, 11 separation of powers in, 135–​36 Tushnet, Mark, 177–​78, 181–​82 unionization, 204–​5 United States. See also Tea Party (United States); Trump, Donald agrarian populism in, 25 Capitol riot (January 6, 2021) in, vii–​ix, 199 constitution in, 155–​56 electoral system in, 60 funding of political parties in, 66 valence competition populism in, 43 white working class status loss in, 32–​33 Urbinati, Nadia, 223n.32, 224n.46, 225n.61, 235n.138, 238n.42, 248n.217, 257n.99 Uribe, Álvaro, 175 Uruguay, 38, 42–​43

Vargas, Getúlio, 35, 182 Velasco Ibarra, José Maria, 38–​39, 161–​62 Venezuela Bolivarian Circles in, 70, 73 constitution in, 38–​39, 73–​74, 136, 155–​56, 160–​61, 162–​63, 164–​65, 170, 174–​75, 180–​81, 182, 184 corruption in, 149–​50 court packing in, 173–​74, 180–​81 dictatorship and, 21, 108 local public planning councils (CLPPs) in, 73 manipulation of elections in, 128–​29 media in, 129–​30 National Assembly in, 15–​16, 73–​74, 174 party system in, 95 plebiscitary approach to populism and, 45, 73–​74 presidential term limits in, 175, 180–​81 separation of powers in, 135–​36 Supreme Court in, 162–​63, 173–​74, 180–​81 urban land regulation (CTUs) in, 73 vertical accountability, 37–​38, 125–​26, 141, 148–​49 Vietnam War, viii Waisbord, Silvio, 49–​50, 51–​52 Waldron, Jeremy, 175–​76, 181 Wallace, George, 50–​51, 61, 87–​88 Washington, George, 193 Way, Lucan, 133, 141–​42, 146–​47 Weber, Max, 3–​4, 10–​11, 26, 123, 192–​ 93, 197–​98 welfare deficits, 17–​18, 28, 34, 43, 106, 202–​3 Weyland, Kurt, 7–​8 Williamson, Vanessa, 49–​50 Zakaria, Fareed, 141 Ziblatt, Daniel, 117–​18